Chosen of the Moon
by Morrighan256
Summary: The tragedy of Diana, the Scorn of the Moon. Born to the Solari of the Rakkor Tribe, she is one of their brightest daughters. But the secrets of the Lunari, dead for centuries, live on in her, and destiny will not be denied. Based on the canon of League of Legends lore, and expanded from there.
1. Chapter 1 The Crippled Scholar

**Chapter One**

 **The Crippled Scholar**

"Diana?"

No answer.

"Diana!"

No answer. He hobbled to the foot of the stairs and called again, balancing his weight on his walking stick, and then began the slow and laborious process of climbing the stairs, grumbling under his breath. The girl usually went to any lengths to avoid making him climb steps, willingly fetching and carrying for him for hours at a time, but in this one thing…

He pushed open the door to her little bedroom, a cozy space with a line of pretty stones she had collected on the window sill, and an empty bed. Through the open windows the wind was bitterly cold, and the full moon was rising.

"Blast and blind the girl," he growled, and stumped back out the door and down the stairs.

If she wasn't where she was supposed to be—in bed, asleep—then there was only one other place she would be.

Domitian pulled a rough woolen cloak over his shoulders and limped out into the darkness, his powerful arms bared to the cold. He had been born Rakkor, and lesser folk said they must absorb the heat of the sun to survive in the freezing cold of the mountains. The Rakkor said that the lowlanders simply let themselves feel too much.

The path wound around a pillared portico that was much too grand for his little house, through a grove of hardy high-altitude cedars and pines and out to an east-facing overlook, an outcropping on the mountainside that plummeted many thousands of feet to the lower mountains where the rest of the Rakkor tribe lived. The Solari came from the Rakkor and were their class of scholar-priests, living at the summit of Mount Targon, which they called the Roof of the World. It was the highest mountain in Valoran, and the place where they were nearest to the sun.

Once, the great eagles had lived there, too. In the oldest legends, the most pious of the Solari had flown on the wings of the great eagles into the sun at the end of their lives, going joyfully to the fire.

It helped to think of fire. Domitian sometimes thought that the entire race of the Rakkor had just deluded themselves into thinking they weren't cold. Maybe if you told yourself a thing often enough, and everyone else said it too, over generations of effort you could make yourself not notice when it was cold enough to freeze the horns off a mountain goat.

He knew the path well enough that he could have found his way blindfolded, and it was good, because the great Two-Faced Stone overhung the path for nearly a quarter of the mile, blotting out even the dim light of the stars. Snow crunched underfoot. Up here there was almost always snow, but the winds were so fierce and variable that it never stayed in one place for long.

The path rose toward a plateau, and from there he could see the jutting edge of the cliff and the little shadow of the girl, sitting on the very edge, dressed only in her belted tunic and sandals. Her pale hair streamed in the wind.

"Diana!" He called again, exasperated, and she turned, her face brightening at the sight of him.

"Look, Domitian!" She cried, running toward him as if they had arranged to meet here. She tugged at the hem of his tunic, pulling him toward the cliff. The moon was almost on level with them, enormous and full and glowing silver, and it looked so near that he almost thought they could walk into it. The little girl's arms stretched out as if to embrace it. "Look how pretty!"

It took everything he had not to smile at her. He braced himself with his staff and looked down at her, his bearded face stern. "You are supposed to be in bed."

"I had to see," she said, turning her pale face to the light.

"It's the same as it was last month, and the month before." Gently, he nudged her with his staff, shepherding her back down the path the same way he had the tough little mountain sheep of his youth. "And how will it look when you fall asleep during the Salutation ceremony, _again?"_

She tilted her head back and wrinkled her small nose at him. "That's the same every _day,"_ she pointed out.

"Even so. We are Solari, child, the sun is our life. Inside, now." He shut the door behind him and pulled off his cloak, hanging it on its peg. "You mustn't do this again, Diana. Someone will think you moon-witted. I shall have to punish you."

She looked down at the floor, prodding the rough wooden floor with her big toe.

"I couldn't help it," she told the floor. "I woke up and saw the moon and it was calling me, Domitian."

"And it told you to get up and go outside and force your old teacher to come out in the cold dark to fetch you?" He asked dryly. "Go to bed, and don't get up again. Next time I really shall punish you."

As he'd said that last time, and the time before, she wasn't terribly worried by this, and less so when he permitted her to hug him, and even kiss his grizzled cheek before she went back to bed. He watched her go, a pale little shade in her white tunic, and he wondered again that she was somehow his. Long past the time when he'd given up hope of having a wife and children of his own, he had somehow acquired this little girl who was as good as a daughter of his own blood.

There had been a time when he'd hoped to be a warrior, fierce as the wind, ferocious as the cold. He had been strong as a boy, swifter than any other. He had killed Sammeas with one blow during the Rite, when he was sixteen. It had been a clean death, quick and merciful. But that same night a chunk of ice had given way under his feet, and he had fallen, and there were many who said it would have been kinder to let him die. He had agreed, at the time. A cripple was no use to anyone. But the Solari priests had said no, all things under the sun had a purpose, and his time to die had not yet come.

In his dreams, Domitian was always falling.

When he rose from his sickbed he could only walk with greatest difficulty, leaning heavily on a walking stick. His world in the Temple Heights was a small one, a daily round from his house to the Archives to the Temple. One of the acolytes did his marketing for him because even the little shops at the mouth of the pass were too far away. But inside the Archives the pages were as wide as the whole world, even wider, perhaps, because the pages moved through time as well as space, and told not just of the Shadow Isles but of their founding, and the strange rites that had been lost and forgotten centuries ago.

He couldn't walk, but he could learn, and he told himself he was too busy to be lonely. There was too much yet to discover, too many things to write and think. He went to bed every night with his eyes burning and in the cold and dark he thought of the sunrise, and sang the sleep-songs he had learned as a boy. He understood his prayers better now; he understood the devotion to the sun, his longing for its light and warmth. It wasn't a purely religious matter, to a scholar. It was a matter of scientific fact. Without the sun, there was no life. Let other, lesser peoples invent their gods. His was always there, undying, something he could see with his eyes, feel on his skin. Who else could say as much of their god?

Crippled as he was, no woman would ever have him. Not women of the Rakkor, who prized strength and fighting prowess among all other attributes; not even among the Solari, who said they had hung up their shields in favor of scrolls, but still had a habit of taking them down again to train every day. They were not soft, stoop-shouldered scholars in the Temple Heights.

Domitian sat down in his chair by the fire in the study to warm himself again before he went to bed, stirring the dying embers back to life. There beside him was Diana's little chair, a replica of his own, even with the same fleecy sheepskin over its hard wooden back. She was a tidy little creature; her workbasket was stowed neatly under the seat, her yarn and needles and thread wrapped up in their own corners. He could hardly remember a time when that basket hadn't been there.

It had been two years since he had found her asleep on his doorstep, curled up with her thumb corked securely in her mouth.

"Oh-h?" He'd said, giving the word an extra syllable and prodding her with his walking stick. "Wake up, girl. Wake up, I say."

When her eyes opened, he was struck by their paleness, so light a blue as to be almost silver. His own eyes were the vivid blue of the sky, and among the ruddy Rakkor this was acceptable, but hers were so light, he wondered if she could see at all. Her silver-gilt hair was strange, too, and for a second he thought she might be one of the _pneumari,_ a specter of the dead escaped from the underworld.

"Where is your mother?" he'd asked, but she didn't know. She never knew.

Her mother was not in the Temple Heights, as it turned out. Nor was she among the families of the village below, or the next nearest, or even the one after that. In the end they decided, after Domitian brought her to the Elders, that she must be from one of the Solari villages lately destroyed by Noxus, in retaliation for the Rakkor warriors who fought with Demacia in the late war. It was possible. Even from the peak they had seen the smoke rising when the sky was otherwise clear, and heard the far distant cries, carried on the wind.

If it was true, she had come a long way.

While the search for her family dragged on, Domitian decided he could tolerate her for a few days and let her remain in his home. Those days became weeks, then months, and by then, blast it all, he'd gotten _fond_ of the absurd little creature. _It's okay, you'll be all better soon,_ she used to tell his socks when she darned them. _I bet it hurts to be all ripped like this, but Domitian didn't do it to you on purpose._

Everything was alive to Diana, everything had a story. His house was never quiet anymore, and she bobbed along at his heels like a talkative shadow.

No one asked him where she would go if they didn't find her family; it was clear that she would stay just where she was. The Solari men accepted it as a sort of unavoidable accident, like being followed home by a puppy who was subsequently adopted by the household, but the women smiled to each other at the change in the old scholar, who—improbably knobbled socks and all—was happier than they'd ever seen him. Diana herself seemed unable to explain who her mother had been, or how she had come to the Temple Heights. The only words they ever got out of her were _dark,_ and _scary._

Very much open to interpretation.

When the search ended, Diana was already well settled in his house. Domitian gave up one of his studies to be her bedroom and had one of the village boys haul bundles of old furs out of the attic for airing to make her bed. She had her own cup and plate that she proudly washed after every meal. Domitian was puzzled as to how she kept turning up with new clothes until he caught one of the Solari women surreptitiously pulling a new cloak over the little girl's head while he was visiting her husband. It was a kindly conspiracy among the women of the Temple Heights, but he still sent the clothing back with a note thanking them for the loan of it. He was a crippled bachelor, but he had not sunk so low as to accept charity. There was an allowance for scholars and the East-facing Sun knew he hadn't had anything to spend it on all these years.

The very next day he send one of the serving girls to the shops with a pouch full of gold, and bought Diana clothes enough to outfit a chieftain's daughter. And that, giving her a tunic and sandals and a warm wool cloak trimmed in purple, and a beaded headband, and quite a few other ridiculous things he didn't remember asking for… _that_ had made Diana his own.

"Look!" she squealed in delight, holding up one pretty thing after another. The beaded headband dangled lopsided over her silvery hair, and her cloak was askew, rumpled over one shoulder. "Domitian, I got new shoes and look! I laced 'em up, too!"

"Very good," he said, bending to inspect the knots that would take him an hour to undo later. He almost tumbled onto his backside when she flung herself at him, squeezed, and then ran off like a little whirlwind to tell the kitchen maid about all her new stuff. And he found he was smiling, broad and foolish as a lowlander, as he bent to pick her headband up off the floor.

* * *

She grew up strong, slender and beautiful as a moonbeam, and that was a great deal of the trouble.

Diana could run as fast as any of the other girls, and when she threw a spear it made his heart sing with pride, for no one threw a straighter spear than his daughter. When she was ten, she was chosen to sing the Salutation in the morning Sun Ceremony, her high, clear voice ringing over the mountain.

 _We salute the sun as she rises_

 _As she comes at break of day_

 _How sure and bright her glowing gaze_

 _When morning comes, and dark night fades…_

Skalos Joras, one of the Elders, told him he'd never heard it sung so well.

But she still crept out of the house on the nights when the moon was full, and he wasn't deaf to the whispers about her unusual coloring. Not everyone, no; only the mean-hearted, the pinch-mouthed, but still they whispered, and it would go hard on her if anyone knew about her strange affinity for the moon. It just wasn't _done._ At night the Solari locked their doors and barred their windows, and they warned their children about fools and madmen and moon-witted savages, drunk and stupid on the lies of the sun's lesser sibling.

He'd finally delivered on the long-threatened punishment. It hurt him terribly to do it, but he knew no other way. And, he told himself fiercely, she would _not_ be spoilt by over-indulgence. He would not do that to her.

"Get inside," he told her in a terrible voice. She was almost eleven then. The cold wind ripped at their clothes and he shoved her toward the house, furious that she persisted in this, after so many warnings. "I have told you again and again not to do this, Diana, and I see that I must show you I am serious."

He was Rakkor. Perhaps among other people, it would have been done differently, but he could only do to her what had been done to him. So that night he took the light switch they used on their mule, Callas, and flogged her until she screamed, then sent her crying to her room.

She truly seemed sorry. She begged his pardon the next morning at breakfast with red eyes, and he hugged her once, hard, then shoved away and stumped away to the Archives. It was not the way of the Rakkor to embrace their children once they were older than seven or so, and maybe that was where he had gone wrong with Diana. Maybe he had held her too close in his heart. He didn't know; there was no one he dared to ask, not about this. But he thought she'd learned her lesson, and he was proud that she had the courage to beg his pardon.

The next month, they repeated the performance.

By the time she was twelve he was at his wit's end, and took to locking her in the cellar on nights when the moon was full, terrified to his bones that it had come to this. He had by then been initiated into the Fourth Degree of the Mysteries, and knew the sun from all its directions, the watery winter Southern Sun, the North, the West, the East-Facing Sun, most glorious. And buried in those mysteries had been whispers of lunar worship.

The Lunari.

No one seemed to know much about them. A dead cult, some said; a myth, said others, like the First Solari, pure fabrication. And he didn't dare ask more, even though he was rising swiftly among the Elders by them, deepening in wisdom and lore. From earliest childhood he remembered the Solari and the Rakkor calling a foolish person moonstruck, mood-addled, moon-witted. _Chasing the moon_ meant a pointless or futile endeavor. Until Diana he had never wondered _why_ they said these things.

He left her crying in the cellar and made his painful way up the stairs to his study, sitting down at his desk by the window and lighting a candle. Down in the village they were all sleeping, their windows dark, while the moon rose full and high over the mountain.

It was on these nights that he kept vigil for his daughter, and he opened one of the books he'd smuggled out of the Archives, an obscure and ruinously old tome that mentioned the Lunari in its later chapters. He was accustomed to talking to Diana about the things he read in the Archives at the end of each day, cultivating her quick mind as carefully as her teachers at school cultivated her body. But he never told her about this.

Over the years he had learned much of the Lunari. He had accumulated scrolls and books enough to fill a shelf of his personal library, if he had dared to leave them out. He took notes, he speculated, he returned again and again to correct his earlier speculations, piecing together a puzzle that might have gone back two thousand years. The Cult of the Moon, wiped out utterly centuries before. It was not the Solari that had built the temple on the Roof of the World and tamed the eagles. The ancient Solari admitted as much themselves; he even found a lost chronicle from Arivan, one of the greatest historians, speaking of the silver eagles of the Lunari.

The Moon Cult had worshiped the other face of the Sun, cold and lovely and sterile. And they had been destroyed utterly, destroyed and forgotten so that the only thing most of his people remembered was the distaste for the moon's deceits, and tales of fools and madmen. What he didn't yet know was why they had been destroyed.

Maybe he was always meant to be a scholar, he thought, pulling his stacks of notebooks closer. He loved the smell of paper, the scratching sound of his quill as he wrote. He even liked making ink, tedious as the process was; grinding the ink stick onto its stone, mixing the colors together. He had more notebooks than he knew what to do with, but he could never resist when the tinkerman came to the door. It was his one indulgence.

He wrote the things that he knew were true in the red book, a thick notebook bound in red leather and bound in golden thread. In the front he wrote his sun-songs, his devotions, he wrote of its angles and arcs and the movement of the heavens. He wrote sometimes of Diana there, and maybe that was blasphemous. _Struck the target today,_ he'd written one day when Diana was learning archery, and another, _chosen to demonstrate the six unbreakable clutches._ That had been a good day. Diana had come home from school bubbling over with it, that she'd put the biggest boy in her class on the ground and kept him there with every single clutch. He hadn't gotten away from her _once_.

In the back of the book, he wrote the things he knew were true of the Lunari.

The irony of this configuration did not escape him.

The things he knew were true of the Cult of the Moon filled only a few pages, more of a list than a coherent narrative. But he opened his book to the correct page and wrote down the next thing that he knew was true, confirmed by six contemporary sources:

 _Vase depiction, warrior with sigil of the moon. Lunari Champion as described by Caraeton, Malleas, poss. Aristos, volume six. Kaiphas, Tiberian, Meridia the Younger, volumes two and three. Champion died defending the Citadel of the Moon Cult 1086, citadel destroyed by fire. Relics disposed of in lunar well._

He didn't know what the significance of the well was, or what the relics might be. But this year was calculated as 2234 by solar calendar reckoning among civilized scholars, so the Lunari Champion had perished over twelve hundred years ago.

It disturbed him. It shook the foundations of his faith, to discover that so much he had been told wasn't true, or was only partly true; so much had been forgotten. He set down his quill and went back to reading. In the back of his mind, he could hear the Salutation song to the sun, and it warmed him, even though he was sitting by an open window. History was complex, he knew that. Only children expected a simple narrative, the innocent and the guilty, absolute truth and lies. Why had the Solari destroyed the Lunari? What had driven them to war?

And he couldn't understand the devotion of the Lunari to the moon, any more than he could understand its strange hold on Diana. It wasn't a mere difference of opinion. The sun was life. It was everything. It burned away falsehoods, it was the hammer and the anvil. It shaped, it refined, it renewed. He had felt sometimes that the waves of its heat in the summer matched the beating of his own heart. And the priests of the sun married, had children, contributed to the life of the world.

The Cult of the Moon, with its sexless priests, was a death cult. Cold and joyless, wavering and faithless as the moon itself.

He paused to listen, but Diana's sobbing had ended. He hoped she was asleep. He'd had a pallet made for her in a dark corner of the cellar and told the kitchen maids that it was for visiting pilgrims and scholars. A poor lie, as no one had visited his home for at least ten years, but he couldn't think of anything better.

He read, and wrote, and watched the moon pass above his window, watched it as he would have watched a foe on the field of battle. He was old now, more than fifty, and there were only a few golden threads left in his beard. But he was Domitian, Elder of the Fourth Degree of the Solari, born of the Rakkor, and somehow he would protect his own. Even from herself.


	2. Chapter 2 The Titan's Spear

**Chapter Two**

 **The Titan's Spear**

In the cellar, Diana cried until she was exhausted and her head ached dully. Curled up on her pallet, she closed her eyes and willed herself to try to sleep, but she knew she wouldn't. Father didn't understand that she _couldn't._ The moon called her, it whispered even in her dreams, its light was like cool fingers in her hair, a caress to awaken her and draw her into the night. Even now she could feel it; she could see the silver glory of the moon in her mind, the stars scattered around it like jewels. They had told her all her life of the sun, but what of its pale sister? What could they learn of the heavens and the world through the moon?

 _Speak of the tides,_ she wanted to tell her teachers. _Speak of the moon on the water. Of the pull of the moon on the women of the Rakkor, its claim on their bodies._

She was almost thirteen now, and a woman, and how could any woman say she didn't know the power of the moon?

But they would not listen, and she was afraid to ask.

It was only a few nights each month. It was like an illness, she thought; she would ask Father in the morning if it might not be so. Maybe she _was_ moon-addled, maybe something had happened to her when she was young that made her sick this way.

"Perhaps," Father allowed when she asked him, stroking his curling beard. She could see him thinking, see the relief he tried to hide from her at the idea. "Can you bear it, my daughter?"

"Yes, Father," she said, and went to school with a lighter heart. She could. It was stupid, that she had to be locked away in the cellar every month, but there were worse things. She could be like poor Father with his walking stick, or like the girl down the street with the skew eye, or she could have pimples.

This, she could hide. There was no hiding it if you had pimples.

When she turned thirteen she was moved to the next class in school, and she was glad, because Lelia and Kallista had been there for months and she had waited _forever_ to join them. She had no way of knowing her actual birthday, but Father had said she had been born into a new life when she came to him, and so they would call that her birthday. It made her a summerchild, which was considered lucky. She guessed she would be happy about that, even if it did mean she was one of the last to join the thirteen year-old class. The good thing was that she knew almost everyone there. It was harder for Kallista, who would move into the fourteen year-old class in a few months and would be the youngest and smallest person again, until Caiphas joined her.

Even better, her new teacher, Skala Euthalia, was the person Diana wanted to be like more than anyone else in the world.

Glad as she was to be with her friends, she was enthralled by the Skala, who was tall and golden and beautiful, her arms and legs hard with muscle, her voice strong and resonant. The Skala had once taken Karacas one fall out of three, it was said, and anyone who could best the paragon of the Rakkor even once was a formidable opponent. Diana was mortally certain her teacher was the smartest, most beautiful woman on Mount Targon.

Eventually she wore out even Father's patience, telling him so.

"I will not hear what Skala Euthalia says one more time," he said, putting down his cup with a thump. "Once per week you may choose the most impressive thing she said or did and tell me that, Diana. One thing. Once per week. Have I made myself clear?"

She sulked, but she got over it. The other girls in school admired the Skala just as much as she did, and it was Lelia who figured out how to copy their teacher's hair, pulling her golden locks into a complex knot of curls on the back of her head, tied with blue ribbon. Then she taught the others, sparking a run on ribbons in the shops.

Diana's pale hair never would curl, but she comforted herself that she would surely be as tall as the Skala, and no other girl could say as much. She was the tallest girl in their class, and had taken to the harsh physical training like a goat to the mountainside. Maybe one day she would fight Karacas, too. She had managed to knock Skala Euthalia over once in the ring, and no one else, not even the boys, had ever done so much.

Only to someone she trusted and admired as much as the Skala—the source of all wisdom in the world, aside from Father, as far as Diana was concerned—would she have dared to ask the question. It happened one autumn afternoon as they were observing the sun making its slow track west, marking time with slashes in the dirt, and then calculated the degrees of its elevation and its changed angle on the earth.

"Skala," Diana whispered when she was sure no one else was listening, "couldn't we do this with the moon, too? Mark its time, I mean?"

"Yes." The Skala looked down at her, a small frown puckering her brow. "But why would you want to do such a thing, Diana?"

Young as she was, she didn't hear the warning in her teacher's voice.

"It's another way we could follow the passage of the year," she said eagerly. "I tracked its phases once, and we could calculate its full cycle—"

"To twenty-nine days," Skala Euthalia finished for her. "And from that we could measure the year. But it is not a useful measure of time, Diana. It is a tiny paring of what the sun tells us, so why would we study a thing that speaks less, and lies in what it does say?"

The idea was straight out of the Solari Devotions, though Diana had never thought of it that way. And she didn't know why it was important to her that there should be another way; the Solari looked for _one_ truth. There was one way to refine their bodies for war, just as there was one path to wisdom, and one way, leading from east to west, to follow the sun.

"But it's still true that the moon cycles every twenty-nine days," she said, small. "It's knowledge. It does no harm to try to learn—"

"But _that_ is the truth," the Skala said, pointing unerringly at the sun, describing its place in the sky without even needing to look for it. "It is the whole of the truth, not a fraction of it. You should already know this, child, I am disappointed in you. We do not deal in half-truths."

"Yes, Skala," Diana said, defeated, and tried not to feel Skala Euthalia's eyes on her as she went back to Lelia. It _wasn't_ the whole of the truth, she wanted to say. Even her admiration for the Skala couldn't make her abandon her inner integrity, the voice inside her that demanded all shades of the truth, and would suffer nothing less.

Her pale eyes were troubled and she looked back more than once, wishing she could try again and say it better somehow. Perhaps Skala Euthalia hadn't understood what she meant. She hadn't had time to say what she'd found about the earth's angle and how it affected the moon, that she'd found a certain wavering…

"What did you say to the Skala?" Lelia asked her after they had been dismissed for the day.

"Just a question about the measurements. C'mon, I'll race you," Diana said, and ran as if she could leave all her questions behind her. Lelia followed with a shout, their sandaled feet digging into the stone of the road toward the market.

"Slow as a Demacian!" Lelia called after her, catching up swiftly. The shorter girl could run like a rabbit.

"Cheat like a Noxian!" Diana shouted back, dodging away as Lelia pounded up beside her. Lelia always threw an elbow when she was getting close. They sprinted through the market and up the road to the Temple Heights square, dodging the bakers and weavers, cobblers and armorers, shrieking with laughter as they rounded the stalls and burst onto the wide stairs leading to the acropolis. This time it was Diana that touched the well first, a step ahead of Lelia. The Temple Heights were mostly deserted this time of the day, but they would fill again at sunset for the evening benedictions.

The boys were already there on the stone benches curving around the well, and Helion scooted over to make room, grinning. Diana ignored him. He'd stolen her lunch yesterday and made her chase him to get it back, and she wasn't ready to forgive him yet.

"You had a head start," Lelia said, panting for breath, and sat down in the vacated space.

"A step at most."

"You _beat me_ by a step at most," Lelia retorted.

"You're both equally slow," Helion declared, making them laugh. "Now, what are we going to do today?"

"Go to the orchard," suggested Borean, who generally wanted to do something involving food.

"Go down to the trader camp," suggested another boy, who liked to talk to the people making their way through the pass. It was late in the season, and it could be the last news they had before the heavy snows blocked the pass.

"Diana?" Lelia asked slyly, knowing what her friend would say. Diana grinned.

"The Titan's Spear," she said, ignoring the groans of the boys. _"One_ of us has to get to the point."

The challenge hung in the air for a long moment, as though awaiting an invisible signal, and then Helion leaped to his feet with a whooping war cry and tore off toward the market. All the rest were on his heels in an instant, jeering and shouting insults at each other. They ran until their eyes watered in the wind and the Solari in the market got out of their way good-naturedly, shouting at the laggards to keep up with their friends. The Solari approved of high spirits in the young, it made for strong warriors when the time came.

A boy or girl that climbed the Titan's Spear would be a warrior to be reckoned with.

The Titan's Spear was on the north side of the Temple Heights, jutting from the side of Mount Targon as if the mountain itself had drawn an arm back for the cast. It was an odd formation of silvery-blue stone, tapering to a point at the end and weathered by the constant wind. Extending nearly a thousand feet from the mountainside, the drop below was dizzying, more often than not obscured by clouds. When it wasn't, like today, they could see clear to the valley floor, many thousands of feet below. Never did they feel that they were on the Roof of the World so much as when they were on the Spear.

There was no surviving such a fall. Most of the young Solari were of the opinion that they'd die of sheer terror long before they hit the rocks below.

But they still tried the climb.

Helion was the first to swarm up the side of the Spear with Diana on his heels, both climbing with the ease of long practice. The rest flung themselves behind them, finding the finger and footholds, laughing and shouting. They were as fierce and wild as wolf-cubs, their slender arms and legs strongly muscled, carrying them steadily up the rock face. Diana had figured out her handholds to about two-thirds of the way up the Spear and moved swiftly, passing Helion at the halfway mark with a triumphant flash of her pale eyes.

"Higher!" Helion shouted, good-natured as ever, and the rest shouted it back and burst into _Taking the Tower,_ a war song about the suicidal charge of the Mage-Tower during the days of Boram Darkwill.

 _We are Rakkor at birth_

 _We shine and we burn_

 _Fear not the fall, kindle the fire!_

 _We are sons of the earth_

 _To the earth we return_

 _Fear not the fall, higher, men, higher!_

They sang it again, _higher, men, higher,_ their feet moving in rhythm, lunging for the next hold high above their heads. It warmed their limbs and paced their breathing and Diana thought she might make it, this time. She sang the words with all her might into the cold, clear air, pushing to reach, catching hold, pulling herself up fluidly. It would be a good omen, if she reached the top today. It would undo what had happened with the Skala. Oh, and what would Father say, when she told him she had climbed the Spear!

They climbed. The song died away and the exhilaration faded to a faint glow, but they still breathed to its rhythm for a little longer, listening to it in their minds, pacing their breathing to it. And at the tip of the great Spear, pale and white and ghostly, the moon rose as they climbed. Not quite full, and it was an early rising in the late afternoon sky, but it was there, and strength flowed into Diana's arms as she fastened her eyes on it.

They climbed. One of the boys fell away, and one of the younger girls, conceding defeat and sliding down with trembling arms and legs. Lelia gave up a little past the halfway mark; her strength was all in her legs. But Helion, taller than Diana and with more stamina, began to overtake her. She set her teeth in her lower lip and climbed, climbed, eyes on the moon and the end of the Spear, even though her biceps were trembling and it felt as though someone was sinking stiletto knives into her muscles.

"Slow, there's a long way to go," Helion gasped beside her, breathing hard, open-mouthed. Still the tip of the Spear seemed no closer, as if by some magic they were climbing and climbing and not moving at all.

"I'm fine," she panted, willing herself onward. It was a sign. The Solari Elders had told them all about omens, and how you had to follow them with courage if you wanted to fulfill your destiny. They had climbed the Spear half a hundred times and never once had she seen the moon at its tip. It meant something, to see it there now; a reward, if she had strength, and the will to endure.

Onward, upward, and she and Helion were the only ones on the Spear now, more than two-thirds of the way and farther than she had ever climbed before. Both of them streamed with sweat, Helion's hair gleaming like beaten copper where the sunlight touched him. He paced her, their hands moving together, his the dark golden brown of the lowland Rakkor, hers pale and smooth, long-fingered.

She found herself whispering under her breath, her eyes fixed on the moon. _Almost there, give me the strength, I can do this, let me reach you,_ and later she thought it was a prayer of a sort she'd never prayed before, without the structure of the Devotions or Benedictions, the words caught by the wind and carried away to whatever ears were listening.

Beside her Helion missed his next hold and paused to recover, his fingers twitching as he shook out one hand, then the other.

"Wait," he said as she passed him, even going so far as to slap at her ankle with the back of his hand. Her arms and legs were trembling visibly with the strain, and the holds were so far apart now that they had to jump to reach them, spaced for someone much taller than they were. "Diana, maybe we—"

"I can do it!" She shouted into the wind, gathering herself for the next jump. "We're going to make it this time, I—"

She heard Helion swear behind her as she tried to push, letting go with one hand and propelling herself upward for the next hold, but suddenly her legs just _wouldn't._ The muscles burned and her knees gave way as if they weren't there, all at once, like a marionette at a Harrowing show with its strings cut. Her left foot slipped from its hold and her stomach dropped as if it were preceding her in the fall, a preview for the rest of her. Then there was nothing in her hands but air, and the endless blue of the sky.

 _"Diana!"_

Her belt yanked against her waist and Helion caught her with a gasping cry, his left arm straining with the effort of holding her. She almost tore them both off the wall, and she scrabbled for a hold, her lips parted in a silent, breathless scream.

"Are you _moonstruck?"_ Helion gasped, his eyes round, his face ashen under its tan. "Oh, by the solstice, we almost came off. What were you _looking_ at?"

"The tip of the Spear," she said, muffled, her face pressed into the silvery stone. "We're all right!" she yelled, knowing without looking that the others had begun to climb to help them; she could hear Lelia's voice in the shouting, ordering them both down this instant. Diana didn't trust herself to look at Helion or the others, and if she was telling herself the truth, she thought she might just be sick.

"We have to go back." Helion took a deep, shaking breath, and flexed his left hand. "I can't catch you again."

If she'd been paying attention to what she was doing, he wouldn't have had to. Her face burned with humiliation, but she forced herself to look at him and say it.

"Thank you."

"I'd never let you fall," he said, and his ears went red.

"Next time we'll get it." She started to climb down, as much to avoid looking into his blue eyes as to get off the stupid Spear. "We could have this time if we'd rested at the halfway mark, I bet."

"We could," he agreed, following her gamely. Halfway down the tower there was a bit of a lip, only five inches deep but still enough to provide a respite. They needed it; Diana was sure her toes were going to come off altogether, and her fingers were cramping terribly.

"Are you done yet?" Lelia shouted from the base of the tower. The others were stamping their feet and swinging their arms against the cold as the sun went down. "We'll miss the evening ceremony!"

"We'll be down when we're ready, Diana wants another look at the moon!" Helion shouted back, to make them laugh.

But there was too much truth in that for her to laugh with them, and her smile at him was tight and forced. After a space of silence, they began to climb down again, and she could feel his eyes on her all the way, wondering.

* * *

The Temple Heights were ablaze with sunset.

It was an overwhelming light, a terrible light, bouncing off the wide mirrors into the white paving stones and dazzling the water of the eternal fountains. There was a geometric perfection in the array of the mirrors, enormous and flashing above and around the crowded Solari, the wide rectangles eight feet wide and five feet tall, catching the light in preparation for its refraction. Diana and the others arrived just in time, slipping into the crowd to find their parents, glad that they were just late enough that there wasn't time to be lectured for it.

She found Domitian by the well, excused from the laborious mirror-positioning by his infirmity. He was tall and grave in the white tunic and golden cape of an Elder Solari, the rays of the embroidered sun spreading over his wide shoulders. Old and crippled though he was, he was still a powerful man. His armbands were tight to the swellings of his biceps and he stood with all his weight on his strong right leg, hiding the withered left with a careful twitch of his cape. That leg pained him at the end of the day, but he would never show it.

"You are very nearly late," he said under his breath, but his hand rested on her shoulder briefly and she knew he forgave her all the same. Somehow she felt she didn't deserve to be forgiven.

"I'm sorry, Father," she whispered back, and waited for the evening Benediction to begin.

It didn't matter whether it was raining or snowing, it didn't matter how ferocious the wind, every day at sunset the Solari came to the Temple Heights and gathered in the great square before the Temple of the Sun. It was their farewell to the sun for the night, their chance to thank it for the light and warmth of the day—however dark and cold the day might actually have been—and ask it to return after the coming night. Even on cloudy days they could still catch its light in the massive mirrors, a feat that seemed nothing less than magical.

Domitian had explained how it worked, that the Elders knew the precise angle of the sun every minute of every day, and that its light still reached them even in the depths of winter, when the blinding snowstorms howled around the mountain. _Light—life—finds a way,_ he'd said, with a rare softness in his eyes, an outward sign of the depth of his faith. And it was true; she had seen it with her own eyes. Last year during the winter solstice, she had seen the light blaze from the thousand mirrors, thrown skyward into the whirling snow like a column of fire.

Diana had often wondered how it looked from the sun's point of view, to see the slow evolutions of the great mirrors from its bed in the west.

The _psalta_ for the Evening Benediction was Helion's mother, a lean woman with hair the same bronze as her son's, pulled back with golden ribbons. The crowd quieted as she stepped forward and began to sing the Benediction. Her voice was low and rich and sometimes Diana was so intent on listening, she forgot to sing the response: _though silent is the sleeping sun, the night will always end._

At the edge of the Heights, where the wide stairs led down to the market, the Elders of the First Degree stood in a line with a row of their mirrors, all covered with golden cloth bearing the sign of the Solari. On the temple steps the drummers began to beat the rhythm, and the gathered people to stamp their feet along with it.

"For the warmth of the day," said the Elders together, practice, no doubt, for when they were sent out among the Rakkor to be their priests. "For the harvest. For the blessings of light and life. For the light that shows us the way, straight and true."

Diana tried not to think what that meant for the moon, what other significance there might be of the sunset, the night. In her head she always reversed what they said. The sun lets us see clearly, the Elders said, and in the back of mind she would think, _but in the dark there is only the dark, and the things the moon shows. Is that not a simpler truth?_ She struggled with it, rationalizing what they said, trying to apply it to the world around her. Even the simple existence of the night meant something to the Solari: the dark time was the struggle for the life of the world, and life was victorious every moment the sun rose.

It made sense. It did. They were right when they said there would be no life without the sun. And maybe they were right when they said the moon was false light, a mockery of the sun, a trick, a deceit. Maybe the night obscured, and the moonlight only obscured further. Maybe it was a trick of the darkness itself.

The great drums began to beat. Skala Euthalia was standing near the row of drummers, her face ruddy gold from the sunlight, and Diana looked away, blending her voice with the chorus of the Solari, the children first, then the women, then the men, and all together as the Devotion rose to its height. The Elders ripped the cloths away from the mirrors and sent the reflected sun into the sky, shot with clouds like drifting flames, a torrent of the sky's own heart's blood.

It was the reflection of the sunset sent from the enormous rectangular mirrors into each other, into the curving mirrors used to diffuse its glow, into the rows of tall, narrow mirrors like individual rays of the sun, and it lit all of the Solari. It was like bathing in liquid sunlight, and Diana closed her eyes with the rest of the Solari to feel the consecration. It was a lesser consecration than the great baptism of light at the summer solstice, but she felt her breath catch and her heart beating deep and slow in her chest, matching the rhythm of the great drums. She could almost feel it, what Father said he felt: the beating heart of the world. The breathing of the sun.

"Father," she whispered, reaching for his hand. "I have to talk to you, after the benediction."

"Of course," he said.

There was a bench in the cedar grove where they liked to sit and talk, a little way down the path behind their house. Father said sometimes that he needed to clear his head, and there was no better place than among the sweet-smelling cedars, sheltered a little from the wind.

When she was little, he used to tell her that trees could speak, but they liked to keep their secrets. It took a wind as fierce as the winds of Mount Targon to shake the truth out of them, because the problem with trees was that they were dreadful liars.

It had made her laugh, but she wondered if she wasn't like those trees now. It took a fall from the Spear to shake the truth out of her.

She told him everything. About how she couldn't sleep on the nights of the full moon, about her conversation with the Skala, about how she had tried to climb to the moon on the Titan's Spear and if it weren't for Helion, she would be dead. It had been a lie, she said, her voice tight with betrayal. She thought it was an omen, the moon at the tip of the Spear, but she had nearly died because of it. She could have killed Helion because of it, because she was so _stupid,_ chasing the moon.

She told him about how she answered back to the priests in her head. About how she had marked the phases of the moon and thought she understood them. She talked until the sky was nearly dark, her voice fading gradually, her head bowed, and the last she confided to the roots of the cedars.

"Oh, Diana," Domitian said heavily when she was done, and pulled her close.

"I'm so sorry, Father."

He sat silent for a long time, but she knew he was thinking and waited quietly. That he might be just as uncertain as she was never occurred to her, and he certainly never showed it. But uncertain he was, and dismayed. This was worse, much worse than he had imagined.

"You are young for this," he said slowly, as if he were picking out his thoughts as he spoke them. "And faith is a hard thing. But for you…you _must_ learn it, my child. I have tried to teach you, that there is one right path, straight and sure. There are reasons we worship the sun, reasons that we shun and fear the moon. You say it deceived you, and it did. It tried to call you to your death. Didn't it?"

"Yes, Father," she said, winking hard.

"It is not an easy path," he said, almost to himself. "And I think…I have reason to believe that some people will be more…susceptible. Blood strains that have survived the centuries."

"A family sickness?" She asked, her eyes narrowed. "Like the bleeding sickness?"

Sometimes he forgot how quick she was.

"Yes, exactly like that. But for you, your faith must be your shield, not medicine. We will go to the Temple tomorrow and see what can be done." He nodded to himself, stroking his beard. "Yes. You will be an acolyte, to better study the faith of the Solari. And our science, our arithmetic, the whole of the puzzle to see how it fits together. You are like me in this, I think. You can't follow what you don't understand. Perhaps I have left this too long."

"It's not your fault, Father," she said, low. "I've been lying to you. Not out loud, but…"

"You have been," he agreed. "It's the worst kind of lie, to lie in your heart. You understand that now, don't you?"

She nodded miserably.

"I will have to punish you for that. It is justice," he added. "For your deception."

"Yes, Father," she said again, and squared her shoulders. Oddly, it made her feel better, to know she would be punished. It balanced the scales.

"You must tell me the truth from now on, not what you think I want to hear. Tell me these thoughts," he said somberly, tilting her chin up with a finger so he could see her strange, pale eyes. "The truth is the right path. The hardest path. You have been floundering in the dark, my daughter, and I should have seen it. I should have seen it sooner."

He didn't embrace her. She was too old for that now, it wasn't done. But she could see it in his eyes, a love for her so deep, so radiant it was blinding. Domitian stood and balanced carefully on his staff, and as he had so long ago, used it to shepherd her onto the path, back home.

"You will come to it as I did," he told her. "You will understand the world, first. The rest will follow."


	3. Chapter 3 Pushing the Wall

**Chapter Three**

 **Pushing the Wall**

At sunset on the eve of her fourteenth birthday, Diana became an acolyte at the Sun Temple of the Solari.

Skalos Joras gave her the surplice himself, and her father stood as her patron and mentor, his big hand on her shoulder as she settled her golden collar over her head, the many-rayed sun surrounding her face like a halo. The vivid colors of the crimson surplice and flame-colored tunic made her hair and eyes look paler than ever, but the Elders were willing to overlook that for Domitian's daughter.

For a little while, it was the busiest, but happiest, time of her life. She was up before dawn with the other acolytes, preparing the temple for the Salutation ceremony, and she learned that most of the work in the temple revolved around the mirrors: moving them, replacing broken mirrors, and polishing them, endlessly polishing them. Diana was convinced that every Rakkor warrior would be the strongest spearman in the world if he only spent a summer polishing mirrors.

Her work in the temple meant less time for her friends, but more time for study. Like her father, Diana devoured every book she was given. She had an uncanny knack for memorization, and had only to read a thing once to make it hers forever. She easily placed into the advanced mathematics and was soon studying trigonometry with acolytes two or three years older, but to her consternation, she lagged in Rhetoric and Logic. She could _write_ an argument beautifully, but for some reason they always tangled on her tongue.

When she wasn't working or studying, she went to the _agoge_ with Lelia, Kallista, and Helion, training beside them with the bow, spear, and shield. At fourteen they were considered adult Solari, and were expected to act as such. If there was another war, they would go to fight; if the Noxians climbed Mount Targon again—unlikely, but it had happened only a little more than a hundred years ago—they would be expected to defend the city.

Skalos Grakos had the charge of preparing his wolf-cubs for actual combat; a daunting task, to corral nearly thirty excitable fourteen year-olds into organized battle lines. But the shield wall and the phalanx were the foundations of formation warfare, and he drilled them mercilessly, from the charge in the _ephodos_ phase to the _othismos,_ the push, where each side tried to force the other line to break. It ended with the _pararrhexis._ The breach. One of the best days was when Diana was the one to breach the shield wall, smashing her shield into the opposite line and powering through, thigh muscles burning as she shoved her iron-shod heels into the ground and dug in. For a moment, when the shields gave way and she shattered the line, she felt invincible.

They aimed practice spears dipped in dye to tag their opponents on the other side of the shield war, and Diana had already been grazed over one shoulder. If it had been an actual wound, she would be bleeding; not badly, but enough to weaken her over a day's battle. Behind her, the spearmen stabbed over and around her, the spears clattering off armor. The spearmen on both sides tried to kill the warriors on the shield wall and disrupt their lines, and Diana, on the shield wall today, could only duck her helmeted head and depend on her armor to protect her, her teeth gritted as she shoved. Skalos Grakos periodically declared someone wounded or dead, forcing them to fall or be carried away, weakening the shield wall for that side.

Around the two sparring lines, there were the smaller _tachoi_ forces, speeding to the flanks to disrupt the formations. It would have been exciting, she was sure, if they had been allowed to skirmish, but Skalos Grakos kept calling a halt.

"No! No!" He shouted again and again, smacking their practice spears aside with the flat of his hand. "You are the wall! Walls do not have heads! They do not turn their heads!" He took Ereon's shield from him and thumped the boy in his helmeted head with it. "Here! _There_ is your enemy! If you do not trust your _tachoi,_ they should not trust you to be a wall!"

Diana had found the hardest part of these exercises was not laughing when the Skalos was yelling at someone. As Skalos Grakos seemed to speak only in exclamations, he was always yelling at someone.

The Skalos threw up his hands and walked back out of the practice ring again, his broad, scarred shoulders banging into shields on both sides of the line.

"Again!" He shouted, dropped his arms, and the shield walls surged into each other once more.

At the end of the practice, they walked away exhausted, water-legged and aching, their shoulders and arms bruised from slamming into the shields. Diana peeled her helmet off and shook her head. Her hair was drenched with sweat, and she had only an hour until she had to be back at the Temple.

"Ready to try the Spear again?" Helion asked beside her, and she smiled up at him. Helion had finally overreached her, and it was strange to have to look up to meet his eyes.

"Better on a day where Skalos Grakos hasn't ground us into sawdust," she said, walking with him to put away their armor and weapons. The practice armory was on the far end of the field, and the cool wind felt good on her hot face. "Anyway, I have to go to the temple."

"No time for your old friends anymore," he remarked to the sky. "The world is a cruel place."

"I am an acolyte," she reminded him.

"And so one day you'll be a priestess and leave us?" He thumped his spear against his chest. "Cruel. Cruel."

"Maybe," she said, and shoved him. "I don't know. Stop teasing me."

"Why did you go to the Temple?" he asked, spinning his spear overhead between his fingers, a trick he was particularly proud of. By now she had become accustomed to walking with the sharp blade of a spear going _whp whp whp_ over her head. "You never told us."

"Father thought it would be best." She colored at the look he gave her. "Well, he did."

"To be sure. But your father would never make you go if you didn't want to. Truth between us."

It was a thing they said often to each other; Diana wasn't sure how it had begun. Sometimes it seemed like a different promise, and the presumption made her nervous and shy of him. But Helion had always been sure of her. Ever since the day they had raced each other to the apple orchard and come in the gates together, there had been some shared sense that no one else could match them so well.

"I thought…I thought I needed to learn more about being Solari," she said, fumbling her way to something that was both honest and inoffensive. "Sometimes I feel that I mightn't be Solari at all."

"You're Rakkor, at least," Helion replied, and knocked his shield into her spear in a reassuring sort of way. "There can be no doubt of that."

"I don't look like one."

"No," He agreed softly, and something in his eyes made her walk faster.

"It comes harder for me, that's all," she said. "The things we believe. I need to understand it better."

"What's to understand? It is there," he said, pointing the sky, where the sun was a little past the noon peak. "You can see it, you can feel it."

"Yes, but what does it _mean,_ Helion?" She asked, more sharply than she meant to. She waved the question away before he could reply. "You see."

"I see you have questions that need answering," he said, and tucked his spear into the crook of his shield arm. "It is another thing we share."

"Is it," she said warily as he caught her elbow.

"Yes. I would like to call on you at your father's house." He had practiced this, she thought; the formally worded question wasn't at all like Helion. His ears reddened. He wasn't asking to come to her house for a friendly visit. He was asking permission to formally court her. Heat rose to her cheeks and she looked away from his earnest blue eyes.

"Yes," she said. She was astonished when he bent and kissed her, quick and a little awkward, his dusty hand tangling in her hair.

"Then I'll see you later," he said, with his easy grin, and darted away, calling for Ereon and Parthas in a shameless bellow that made Diana turn crimson. _"She said yes! Parthas! I told you she would!"_

 _"Helion!"_

He was already gone. Near the armorer's stall, Lelia and Kallista were laughing uproariously, Kallista sagging against the counter with her hand at her middle. For a moment Diana stood there, flushed with mingled outrage and amusement, and then she laughed and trotted over to them.

* * *

She thought of Helion when she was locked in the cellar.

Like Domitian, Helion was a part of the sun she could recognize and love. Sometimes she thought it was the key to the lock that barred her from the rest of the Solari: that their love for her, and her love for them, would show her the way. They were children of the sun, it was bred in them, built into their bones.

Diana knelt before the tiny altar she had built with her father a few months before, wearing the white toga of an acolyte at her devotions, and prayed. She sang her sleep-songs, the Salutation song, her voice rising high and sweet, clear as ringing wind chimes in the darkness of her prison.

 _For sweetly sings the setting sun_

 _A farewell in fire, the twilight burns_

 _One simple truth she always speaks_

 _The night will end; the light, return._

It was a prison, for all that she went in willingly and she knew her father would be waiting for her in the morning to unlock the door. If she didn't pray, if she didn't kneel at her altar, she kept finding herself at the door, testing the lock again and again without any clear idea of how she'd gotten there. She made her own rituals, facing the east with her arms outstretched. She looked at the dark. She contemplated it. She could see the value of light; it was self-evident, it required no imagination of her.

She looked squarely at the deadness of the dark and imagined the world beyond, equally lifeless. The cold without the sun. The barren earth.

Then she imagined the sun rising, the sudden flare as it broke the horizon, and it was too bright even in her mind, sharp and sudden and dazzling. She recoiled and blinked it away, imaginary sunspots dancing in her eyes.

She willed herself to feel the warmth her father described, the connection to the sun, the day, the light of the world. She could see his faith when he tried to explain it to her; there was no doubt it was real, as full and many-faceted as a gem, so much more complex than the simple, straightforward belief of Helion. Domitian had assembled his faith as painstakingly as he built his models of the heavens. They were wondrous things, the marvel of the Archives, accurate in their angles and motions to the hundred thousandth decimal place. That was _his_ faith, she thought, and sometimes she despaired.

She didn't think she would have decades to assemble her faith as he had, somehow.

The Skaloi of the temple did not like her questions.

She had sworn to her father never to lie in her heart, and she would not break that promise. But it was hard, hard when the other acolytes began to look at her sidelong, and Skalos Abeon—he was the worst, a lean, ascetic man whose faith burned hot and dangerous—picked at her, circled her, like a wolf deciding which morsel would be best to devour.

"The East-facing sun," he said today, as they walked through the temple gardens. He taught in the manner of the old rhetoricians, preferring to walk and talk with the acolytes, questioning them to force them to find the knowledge within themselves. It was an affectation, as far as Diana was concerned. She lagged behind the rest, hoping to go unnoticed. "Thalian, what can you tell me of it?"

"It is the dawn victorious," Thalian said promptly. "From its hue we can foretell the manner of the day."

"Yes. And?" The Skalos looked back, searching for volunteers, and Diana avoided his eyes. Ariadne answered, talking about the measure of the hours, the waxing and waning of the sunlight over the course of the year.

"It is the constancy of the sun," The Skalos said. "What might I mean when I speak of constancy? Diana?"

She knew the answer he wanted; she had made the mistake of referring to phases of the sun a few weeks before. It seemed to her the sun _did_ have phases, just like the moon; the longer phase of the year, from solstice to equinox, the watery winter sun cycling back to its summer potency. But that was not a truth Skalos Abeon admired.

"The sun is unwavering," she said. "It rises every morning without fail."

It was sufficient; she bit her tongue to keep the rest back. The Skalos was trying to bait her into losing her temper, and the more he provoked her, the shorter her temper grew. He went on to another acolyte with his next question, and she thought she was safe. But like that wolf, Abeon soon circled back around to attack from another direction.

Later she couldn't even remember exactly how he said it; something about the patterns observed by learned men who had been trained to think, and the speculations of fools, who find omens in the flight of pigeons. There was nothing on the surface that showed he intended the hit for her, and he couldn't know about the mistaken omen on Titan's Spear, but Diana flushed with fury all the same.

"Did we not once tell the future with the entrails of pigeons?" she asked with poisonous sweetness, to the amusement of some of the other acolytes. Skalos Abeon's thin lips curved, his eyes lighting with satisfaction.

"Two hours on the mirrors for your insolence, phila Diana," he said softly, and she knew she had done exactly what he wanted her to do.

Two hours polishing mirrors made her miss her supper, and she came home in a foul mood, her arms aching miserably. Father was in his study, and she knew when he closed the door it meant her interruption would be unwelcome, unless it was the direst emergency. He was an Elder of the Fifth Degree now, and she supposed he was reading some Solari Mystery that she couldn't be allowed to know, some deep knowledge that would burn out her eyes, like the heretic of Skarphogi at the Summer Solstice.

Stuffing half a loaf of bread into her mouth, she carried a tray of cheese, olives, and grapes from the lower slopes of Mount Targon up to her room, sitting down at the little table they'd managed to squeeze beside the window, a place for her to study. Like her father, she liked having the window before her when she studied: looking down at the lights of the town helped her think. She read a chapter of Arivan's _Historia_ while she ate, watching the thin sliver of the moon rising. Then it was _Logos_ and _Geologia,_ and she practiced her arguments for Rhetoric aloud. She had structured the argument well on paper, but when she tried to say it out loud, she kept forgetting key points, circling back to them later, disrupting the flow of the logic.

And her opponent tomorrow was Clytemne, she thought, furious with herself as she stumbled into silence for the fourth time. Clytemne was a year older and had never liked her, though Diana had no idea why. The bullying of Skalos Abeon was the breach in Diana's shield wall; until now, she had been too bright, too excellent to attack. Not so long ago she would have had many defenders, but she had left her pack behind, and Helion, Kallista, and Lelia couldn't help her in the Temple.

That was the worst of what the Skalos had done. He had made Diana look weak, and then given weapons to people like Clytemne to use against her.

She heard her father's walking staff thumping downstairs and shielded her candle with her hand, so he wouldn't know she was still awake. If he didn't ask her what had happened today, she wouldn't have to tell him, and that wasn't a lie by any definition.

The sound of his staff faded, and she heard his bedroom door shut. The village was dark, the faint light of the moon and stars glowing silver on the slate roofs, a quiet light, a kind light. It hid the darkened windows and doors, it washed out the colors. The world was simpler under the moon.

* * *

"And then Skala Legeia told us to sit down, and she would speak to us after class," Diana concluded gloomily.

"Why don't you just come back to train here?" Kallista asked, leaning on her spear. They were sitting under a stand of black pines on the side of the practice field, and for once, Diana was in no hurry to go the Temple for the afternoon.

Diana shook her head wordlessly, balancing her own spear on the toe of her boot.

She felt rather than saw her friends exchanging a glance over her head, and part of her wanted to tell them everything. If she hadn't spent the night before in the cellar, she might have, but the simple fact that her father had to _lock her up for the night,_ like King Lykaos in the stories, drove home the seriousness of the danger. Tonight was the last night of the full moon, and she wanted nothing so much now as to sleep.

"Where does she live?" Lelia asked, tilting her red-gold head to one side.

"You are not going to go beat her up."

"No, all of us are," Lelia said cheerfully, and made Diana laugh.

"That would make it worse," she said regretfully, but knocked her shoulder into Lelia's to thank her.

"They're strangers up at the temple," Kallista observed. She was as tall and lean as her spear and had a habit of balancing it over her shoulders, her long arms wound around the stout ash shaft. "They know each other like we do. You're _amyita_ to them."

Diana shrugged. That wasn't the whole of it, though it was true; the children of the Temple had already formed their friendships, and she was an outsider. Father had wanted her to have the Rakkor childhood he'd had when he sent her to the _agoge_. And she wouldn't have given it up for the world. They called the children of the _agoge_ wolf-cubs, and Lelia, Kallista, Helion, and the rest were as good as her brothers and sisters, as good as her own blood.

It was a good thought, but she was done feeling sorry for herself, at least in front of Lelia and Kallista.

She swiped the butt of her spear at Kallista, the hard pole smashing into the taller girl's shin in a sudden attack that made Kallista's wide mouth curve in a fierce grin.

"We can't go fight Clytemne, so you want to dance with me?" She asked, and stabbed outward, her long body propelling the spear like a bow from the string. Lelia rolled out of the way swiftly, clearing the way for the duel.

"I won't get in any more trouble for thrashing _you."_ Diana blocked the next thrust of the spear, turning it aside and sweeping her spear in a whistling arc that would have cut Kallista's throat, had it landed. They had graduated to true iron, sharp and lethal, and it was true that Borean had almost lost his arm when he was too slow with his shield, but Skalos Grakos said bloody training made for bloodless combat.

"No, indeed," Kallista agreed. "Everyone would be too amazed. _Stay there!"_ She shouted, stabbing her spear at Diana's foot, an odd but effective maneuver that would have pinned her right foot to the earth if it had landed.

"When is Ereon calling on you?" Diana asked, puffing a little as she snapped back into the third form, her spear held crossways over her body.

"Two days. Ooh, nice try." Kallista spun out of the way, the shaft of her spear snapping to block Diana's quick reverse.

"He's afraid of her mother," Lelia remarked, lifting their shields in each arm. "Shields to whoever gets it first!"

They dove at the same time, spears whirling, and Diana nearly had her that time, her spear sweeping out and up in an arc that almost cut the other girl in two. Kallista bent double to avoid it and snapped her shield out, almost knocking Diana's shield off her arm.

"Tied," Lelia commented, and retired to the base of the black pine to keep score.

"He…is… _not_ …afraid of my mother," Kallista grunted, their shields grinding together, cords standing out in her tanned legs as she shoved with all her might…and then let her shield slip with a shout, overbalancing Diana. Kallista's spear shot forward again, the line of her body and spear so perfectly level and straight that Diana would have applauded, if the spear wasn't aimed for her heart.

She followed her shield and rolled down the shaft of the spear, smashing an elbow into Kallista's chin.

" _Everyone_ is afraid of your mother," she panted, and glanced at Lelia.

"Tied," the girl said implacably.

"Ereon loves my mother," Kallista growled, but it was a weak retort, because what Diana said was true. The people who ran afoul of Elder Jocaste regarded it as something like a rock slide or a bolt of lightning from the blue sky: simultaneously an unavoidable catastrophe and a judgment of heaven.

They went back and forth in the dust, the pale earth of the field clinging to their sweating bodies, and while Kallista's form was perfect, Diana's instincts seldom failed her. She knew somehow when Kallista would lunge from the balance of her body, the weight on one foot or the other, or maybe just reading something flickering in the other girl's dark eyes. She countered, stabbed out, spun with her shield, good, clean sweat rolling down her face, stinging her eyes.

It might have gone on until dusk if she hadn't looked up at the sky and seen, appalled, the position of the sun.

"Oh, sweet summer sun," she gasped, and backpedaled, throwing down her shield and tossing her spear to Lelia, who caught it one handed. "I'm late."

"You lose," Kallista crowed.

"No, I am _late,"_ she enunciated. "Take over for me, Lelia!"

She sped off with Kallista's jeering ringing in her ears, her breath already drawing a stitch into her side. It was nearly two miles from the _agogia_ to the Temple, and she ran every step of the way, ignoring the amused glances in the market place as she pelted toward the temple steps. She wasn't the first acolyte to be late to her work, but she had the distinction of being the one who was late to Skalos Abeon's class, and she honestly didn't know which was worse: her tardiness, or the fact that she was sweat and grime from head to toe.

In the garden, she found them, or they found her as she rounded a corner and stopped, gasping. Skalos Abeon was in the front of the small group of acolytes, one hand upraised and two fingers pointing in the formal rhetorical pose that meant he was not only declaiming some point of dogma, but being unusually full of himself while he did it. His hand slowly lowered as he looked at her, his lips curling, and Diana drew herself up. Behind him, she could see the other acolytes ranged, like a flock of geese in flight, or the spear-point formation of a flanking charge of _tachoi,_ coming to break the wall.

"Phila Diana," the Skalos said slowly, to give himself time to frame the insult. A few of the students were stone-faced, but most of the rest were beginning to smile. "Were you rolling around in the dust with dogs before you got here? Shame, shame. An acolyte of the great Temple of the Sun and you still prefer the company of common curs."

Diana sucked in a breath, her pulse pounding in her forehead.

"Better a dog in the dust," she said, her voice shaking with rage, "than a pompous jackass."

She was very, very late coming home that night.

* * *

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 _Author's Note: The next chapter might take a few days longer than usual, as I'm moving in real life. Please review if you've enjoyed the story so far. To answer a question asked elsewhere, the non-English words are shamelessly mutilated Greek._


	4. Chapter 4 Pararrhexis

**Chapter Four**

 **Pararrhexis**

It dawned slowly on Domitian that he wasn't seeing much of his daughter these days.

The first time he noticed was when he was standing at the foot of the steps at home, looking up the creaking, curving staircase with a sigh at the thought of climbing it. Occasionally his books overflowed his study and he had Diana carry them to the library upstairs. Now he wanted one of them and she wasn't here and he'd already dismissed the kitchen maid for the day.

That was when it jangled in the back of his mind that he hadn't seen his daughter in…nearly a week? Surely not so long.

He set his walking stick on the first step and pushed himself up, his other hand on the wall for balance, but inwardly he shrugged. The skies above knew Diana had enough to keep her busy, between the Temple and the _agoge._

Another week passed before he realized he hadn't seen her _or_ the boy in some time, and Diana had made such a to-do of having Helion over for a meal at least once a week, to let them get used to each other, she said. And colored prettily when she said it. Initially Domitian had resented the boy, if for nothing else than forcing him to acknowledge that Diana wasn't a child anymore, but Helion had addressed that with his customary frankness.

"I know we aren't even betrothed yet," he told Domitian, while Diana was in the kitchen nervously arranging lamb and cheese into their little grape leaf pouches, "but we will be. And when we marry, sir, I know Diana would like us to stay with you."

"Aren't you getting ahead of yourself, boy?" Domitian had replied gruffly, taken aback.

"No," Helion said simply. "We were meant for each other. And I want her to be happy."

It was true. Domitian had expected it ever since, during a squabble, he had seen nine year-old Diana clout Helion with a stick and stalk away. Helion had just laughed, and the way he looked at her was like watching the stars align in the night sky.

Domitian hadn't warmed to the boy all at once, but he did catch himself thinking idly about how it would be in a few years' time, that perhaps there was space enough to build another room off his study, overlooking the cedar grove. They would need another room, and perhaps another kitchen maid. Domitian and Diana ate simply, and sparingly, but Helion was a young man, and young men went through astonishing amounts of provender.

And to think, _he_ might be a grandfather! Domitian had never thought he would be a father, but he found himself imagining what it would be like when Diana's children were born, watching them grow, teaching them their letters, the way he had taught their mother. With Diana he had been too nervous about raising her to truly enjoy her childhood, too determined to do right by her to appreciate all her little girl sweetnesses and absurdities. It would be different, with a grandchild.

Yes, it was odd that he hadn't seen the boy in so long, but they were all busy, weren't they? Helion would be as busy as Diana, for the training of a Rakkor boy was all-consuming. Domitian had endured it himself, and he remembered the early mornings, soaked with sweat and dew on the practice field while he trained, running endless miles in full armor, shield clattering on his back. He would come home at the end of the day bruised and bloodied, sometimes with an eye blackened, his nose broken and reset, his hide stitched together where the spear or the sword or the dagger had scored a hit. He did not fondly remember the pain, but he remembered his brothers. He could still see their faces to this day. You never forgot the men you bled with.

Besides, he himself was wrapped up in the deeper Mysteries of the Solari and the great riddles of the stars. There were facets of color within the white of the sun's light, and ah, that had made the hours run away from him, debating their significance in both scientific and theological terms. And there were his studies of the Lunari. He had been following a long thread, a very long thread indeed, but he had at last new names to pursue in the Archives, references to heresies who survived the extinction of the Lunari. Two names: Menephos and Phereio, and even more tantalizing, reference to hidden works describing the prophecies of the Lunari, who had elevated the study of the heavens to a religious rite in itself.

On the night of the full moon Domitian realized he hadn't seen Diana in a _month._ A full turning of the moon had come and gone and the last time he had seen her was when he unlocked the cellar door and let her out. At the top of the cellar steps he stopped, patting the key around his neck. He had just locked her in, more as a matter of habit than conscious action, and stopped only to make sure he could see her pale hair gleaming in the candle light before he locked the door.

"Oh no," he said, and shook his silver head. Age had been kind to him, even if fate had been cruel; he had lost the use of his leg, but kept all his hair, thick and curling. He turned and stumped back down the stairs. "No, no, no. Diana?"

This wouldn't do at all.

"Yes, Father?" she called back, coming to the door. There was a barred window there, too much like an actual prison for his liking, but he kept forgetting to have it replaced.

"I've just realized how little I've seen you. A month now," he said, unlocking the door. She stood back to let him in, but instead of the surprise and regret he expected, she just looked at him, her face empty.

"I've been busy, Father." Turning away, she knelt before her altar again, a pale figure in her white tunic.

"Of course," he said, "but surely they don't keep you so busy you can't share a meal with your old father now and then?"

Her eyes flicked up at him, reflecting the gold of the candlelight, and he saw that one of her eyes was blackened, and there was a scrape on the right side of her jaw. The marks did not trouble him in and of themselves, but the look in her eyes troubled him greatly.

"Yes, Father," she said, leaving him to interpret that however he chose.

Domitian shifted his balance, at a loss.

"And what about…er…Helion," he said, searching for a foothold, some way to break through this strange apathy.

"He understands." Diana kept her eyes on her altar, a little platform of gilded oak that they had bought together in the market, set below a sculpture of the four-facing sun. "I have to pray now, Father."

He looked down at her, and maybe if he had reached for her, and stroked her pale hair like he used, it might have been different. But she was growing up, he told himself; all the mothers at the Temple had warned him about this, that these years would be trying, that Diana would be moody and sullen and difficult and just wait, he'd see. He hadn't _really_ believed it, but perhaps that was all it was.

"Is it helping?" he asked. "Praying?"

"No, Father," she answered with that same curiously flat tone, bowing her head and lifting her cupped hands. In the Temple, she would do that by the Eternal Fountains, splashing the water to fling out the sunlight in droplets. He heard her whisper, _May the light increase,_ but here in the cellar there was only shadow in her hands.

For the first time he looked at her and thought, _Lunari,_ and believed it.

"I'll…I'll speak to you in the morning," he said, and laid his hand on her head. "Try to rest your mind, Diana, if you can't actually sleep."

But of course, the next morning, he couldn't bring himself to confront her about whatever was wrong with her. Not when she was so tired, he told himself when he let her out of the cellar, her face pale and her eyes deeply shadowed. In the morning light he could see more marks on her back, what looked like the stripes from a cane, which troubled him still more. Diana had suffered her beatings and canings at the _agoge_ just like all the other wolf cubs; it strengthened them, it taught them to endure pain, as they must do in battle. The wolf cubs even made a game of it and taunted anyone who cried out unmercifully.

But no one at the _agoge_ would have struck so close to the back of her neck and head, where it was too easy to cripple and even kill. No, those were marks from the Skaloi at the Temple, and that could mean nothing good.

"Diana," he said, reaching for her retreating back. "What happened to—"

"I'm going to be late for the Salutation ceremony, Father," she said over her shoulder, clattering down the stairs in her iron-shod sandals. The front door slammed shut behind her.

 _After the full moon,_ he told himself, sinking back into his chair. He would do her the courtesy of asking her first, and giving her the opportunity to tell him what was wrong. But one way or another, he would find out.

* * *

The stories said mad dogs went madder on the night of the full moon. They flung themselves to the ground, jaws slavering as they bayed at the sky. They foamed and they bit anything and everything, they bit the air, they lived only to pass on their madness.

When Skalos Abeon referred to the wolf cubs of the _agoge_ as dogs, even the other acolytes took offense. The Skaloi, if they had known about it, would have punished him for it. There was no ill-will between the Temple and the _agoge;_ they were the heart and the fist of the same body. But the Skalos apologized before anyone could say anything to the other Skaloi, claiming he had chosen his words poorly, that he had been referring to the stray dogs that frequented the fields of the _agoge_ and he had meant nothing more than that.

To Diana he offered no apology, and he had accomplished his objective: to apply the word _dog_ to her, which led as inevitably to the mad dogs under the moon as winter led to spring. _Moon-addled,_ they said, _barking mad._ She didn't even ask questions of her Skaloi anymore, and still they said it.

 _She's not Solari,_ they whispered, and _She's not even Rakkor,_ said others. The story of her appearance on Domitian's doorstep circulated all over again, and her appearance was an issue of great interest to the female acolytes, particularly among Clytemne's circle. _Pale as a Shadowling,_ they said, though none of them had heard more than the vaguest rumor of the Shadow Isles. _Imagine,_ they said, _a great man like Elder Domitian taking something like_ that _in._ Well, it just went to show that even the wisest men could be deceived…

She could swallow the insults to herself. But when they brought her _father_ into it…

"Shame, Phila Diana," Skalos Abeon would say, shaking his head in a mockery of sorrow. "What would your father think?"

After many months of trying her defenses, slicing away at her pride and temper and even her abiding sense of justice, the Skalos had finally found a weapon that worked. Mentioning her father never failed to make Diana flash hot and cold, a knot burning sick in her belly. It worked because it was true. Father would be disappointed in her. He might even be ashamed of her. She had hurt his reputation in the Temple, she had betrayed her promise not to lie to him, and she had never failed so utterly at anything in her life as she had failed at being an acolyte. She knew in her heart that Domitian would love her all the same and would help her if he knew what was happening, but she couldn't bear to ask. She cringed when she thought of the look on his face, the sound of his voice, the way he would say, _oh, Diana…_

So she said nothing. She controlled her fear and tried to control her fury, though she slipped more than once and was punished for her impertinence, her rudeness, her obstinacy. She tried to ignore it all and hoped that if she didn't feed the fire it would starve. She scorned Skalos Abeon, she scorned the other acolytes, and made herself deaf to their whispering. Skalos Abeon could get away with insulting her to her face, but the other acolytes knew that if they insulted her directly, she wouldn't allow it to go unpunished. She would be thought a coward by all the Rakkor if she didn't answer the insult with steel, and even the older acolytes were wary of facing her on the field of honor.

Especially lately.

 _"Enough!"_ Skalos Grakos bellowed, clashing his sword against his shield to cut over the din. Diana pulled her final swing and stepped back from a pale, sweating Apphia, who had been pressed to the edge of the sand ring. The Skalos gave Diana a congratulatory clout on the shoulder that knocked her forward a few paces. "Like a whirlwind, little silver hair!" He boomed. "You will make the enemy fear you! Next!"

She'd done a good job with Apphia; the girl scuttled out of the ring instantly and Diana swapped her sword for a glaive, a long pole weapon with a wickedly curved blade at the end. It was her best weapon, more natural to her hands than a spear or a bow. The sweeping strokes she favored worked better with a glaive than a spear.

She had saved the weapon deliberately for last. Today was the _sthénos,_ an endurance trial pitting one exhausted warrior against a succession of fresh ones to see how long they could last. She would need the edge of a good weapon. And it was Lelia, rested and bright in her bronze plate armor, her fiery hair pulled back in a long plait, that would finish it.

"Luck," Lelia said, and clapped her helmet on her head.

Diana nodded to her, sweat rolling down her face under her own helmet. The helms of the Rakkor were the ancient T-shaped configuration, tight to the head and long to the shoulders to protect the back of the neck and throat. The eye slit was the top of the T, the gap extending down over the nose and mouth so the warrior could breathe freely. The flaring bottom of the helmet also meant they held heat like a forge.

"Begin!" called Skalos Grakos, and Diana lunged before he had even finished the word, knowing that a fresh opponent would try to wear her down. Lelia wasn't one of the best fighters, but she was by far the best tactician.

Lelia backpedaled swiftly, lifting her heavy glaive to block Diana's slashing forward stroke, the point of her blade circling, waiting for an opportunity to jab. The girls circled, ignoring the shouts from the other _sthénos_ rings, the distant clashes of shield and spear and sword.

Proper form with the glaive was upright, almost like a two-handed duelist; maneuvering for position and then thrust and slash, upward to rip with the pointed tip, downward to slash with the broad blade. You could crush a man's skull with a glaive or cut his head off altogether, depending on how you used it. The glaives of the Rakkor had longer tips than the Noxian or Demacian variants, but the Rakkor were spearmen, first and foremost.

Diana rarely used the point, preferring the blade. She attacked and circled, attacked again, using her longer reach to drive Lelia back, sweeping outward to force her to the left, then right. It was a game of moves and countermoves, intended to off-balance her opponent and get inside her guard for the finishing stroke. But Lelia evaded again and again, ducking the sweeps or parrying them aside with the reinforced shaft of her glaive, the shock of the blows running up both their arms to the shoulders. Diana forced her tired feet to move faster. Lelia was playing for time, trying to wear her down.

They fought in silence, with none of the taunting of a friendly bout. They breathed together, deep inhalations through the nose, the way they had been taught when they were children. The Rakkor trained their warriors to breathe properly by making them run with water in their mouths. Anyone who didn't have a mouthful to spit out at the end had to run again.

It was going on too long. Diana sucked in a ragged gasp and let herself slow, let herself stumble, the tip of the heavy glaive dropping. Lelia took the bait. With a ragged scream she lunged, her blade swinging out in an arc that would have slammed squarely in the notch between Diana's shoulder and neck if it had landed; a killing blow. But Diana dropped to one knee and slid inside Lelia's guard as neatly as a key into a lock, pushing herself forward with a snapping thrust as perfect as any Kallista had ever thrown.

The point of the glaive skidded off Lelia's cheek plate and then, to Diana's horror, _into_ the eyeslit, bursting back out over her nose with a gout of bright blood. For a single second, they both stared in shock, blood droplets spraying out onto the sand, and then Diana dropped her weapon and her scream rose before Lelia's did.

She didn't remember tearing off her helmet and running to Lelia, pulling off Lelia's helmet to see blood, so much blood, all the while screaming for Skalos Grakos. Lelia's gauntleted hand clapped over her eye and her mouth was open in shock and pain, screaming an awful, breathless, panting scream. From underneath her hand to the bridge of her nose, blood flowed in sheets, like a wave rolling at low tide.

"Move," The Skalos said, shoving Diana aside, and she staggered back, feeling almost lightheaded with horror. "Let me see, girl," said the Skalos to Lelia, pulling her hand away from her face.

His broad, sweating back blocked Diana's view as he straightened, and she didn't want to see, she didn't want to know what she'd done to Lelia's pretty face. Blood was pattering to the sand in audible droplets and she could smell it, how much blood was there when you could hear it, smell it? _This happens,_ she told herself frantically. _We train with iron, there are accidents…_

But this accident was her friend. _Her_ fault.

"Come with me," Skalos Grakos said to Lelia, forcing her to walk with her hand cupped over her eye, steering her with his big hand on her shoulder. "You won't die, girl. Be quiet. Where is your iron?"

"Lelia, I'm sorry," Diana choked, the words squeezed around a lump in her throat. "Lelia, I'm sorry!"

The eyes of the other wolf cubs were on her and for a moment it was like the eyes of the acolytes at the Temple, the awful naked feeling she felt when Skalos Abeon had said something particularly cutting and all of them turned to _look_ at her. Accidents did happen in the _agoge;_ Skalos Grakos had said it himself, any number of times. Bloody training made for bloodless combat. But then a sob escaped her and after everything else, she _would not cry_ in front of them. The Temple had seen enough of her weakness. She would not show it in the _agoge._

She turned and ran. Across the field, out of the gates, without the least idea of where she was going, away from them, away from everyone. She ran to the narrow cliffside paths that skirted the village, her breath rasping as she breathed hot and harsh. Her sandals flew over the rock and thin, patchy grass as she rounded the Two-Faced Stone and came to the cedar grove behind her house.

Her armor was stifling. She stripped it off as she crossed the grove, her fingers trembling as she jerked at the leather laces that joined her breastplate and back plate at her shoulders and sides. Underneath was her practice tunic, dark red to hide bloodstains and belted with studded leather, the thin linen fabric streaked white with the salt of her sweat. Her gauntlets, her greaves, she couldn't bear them, even her sandals and armbands. Barefoot, she sat down with a thump on the stone bench.

She wanted her father. She wanted him more than anything else in the world, but he was at the Temple, and that was the last place she would go. A terrible tightness squeezed in her chest and her eyes burned, then blurred.

It was Helion that found her after she had cried herself into a sort of gray dream, lying on the stone bench and watching the tops of the cedars swaying in the wind, her eyes swollen and red. She heard his armor jingling and looked up, letting her head thump back onto the stone when she saw it was him. She looked so unhappy, it broke his heart.

Silently, he gathered up her armor and piled it neatly beside the bench. He was as dusty and sweaty as she was, his hair standing up in damp spikes, his face set in unusually somber lines.

"I waited to see what the physicians said," he told her gently, dropping to one knee beside her. "They can't be sure yet, but the one I spoke to said that she might keep her eye."

More tears welled. "Good."

"Diana," he said, and caught her chin to make her look at him. "You can't blame yourself."

"Who else's fault is it?"

His lips tightened. "When I smashed Borean's shoulder and almost cost him his arm, what did you tell me?"

She didn't answer until he shoved her, but her essential honesty forced her to tell the truth when she did.

"We train with iron," she said, and scrubbed at her eyes with her fists. "But _I_ hurt her, I pushed too far, I can't do anything right. I'm ruining _everything,_ Helion! You don't know how…Lelia's so pretty," she wept. "And now she's going to have a scar and it's bad, I saw enough to know it's bad."

"Move over." He nudged her with his knee, and pushed her up with a hand on her elbow. "Now then," he said, wrapping a dusty arm around her shoulders. "You have scars, and so do I. We'll have a great many scars and worse ones when we die, and they burn us on the funeral pyre at the Temple."

"This is a scar _I_ gave her."

"And perhaps you'll give her worse, or I will, during the Rite," he reminded her. "It's less than two years away. What if you're assigned to Lelia then? Or Kallista? Or—"

"If they assign you to me, then I will die," she said, and he ran his fingers through her hair, the silver-gilt gone to iron with sweat.

"We'll _both_ die," he said. It was a promise they had made each other, and one that had precedent; on the rare instances when lovers were paired for the Rite, most of them chose to kill themselves rather than fight. The singers called it a Solstice Wedding. "But if it's Lelia?"

Diana was silent. The Rite had once seemed impossibly far away, but on this side of fourteen it was no longer so distant in the future that she could dismiss it with a shrug. At sixteen they would be put to their final test before they joined the ranks of the adult Rakkor warriors. The Rite of Kor. It was as much a test of their faith as it was a test of strength and fighting prowess.

The Solari said the day was born in blood, and died in blood. It was true. She had seen it with her own eyes, the pool dark as heart's blood at dawn and sunset where the sun sank beneath the mountains. A bloody dawn or sunset meant the battle with the night was particularly fierce. And so it must be with the Rakkor. Every year on the winter solstice, the Rakkor youth who had turned sixteen were paired off to fight to the death, to die in blood, to be born in blood. Any butcher could kill. It was a test of the strength of their faith, the final tempering of the warrior's steel, to kill a friend, someone they had grown up with, broken bread with, trained and bled with. Nothing else would ever be so difficult. A warrior who survived the Rite had proved themselves strong, fortunate, and above all, faithful: the chosen of the sun.

"It will be the same for me, if they assign me to fight Borean or Caiphas. Or Parthas. Or Ereon," Helion said, and sighed. "When I hurt Borean, it took me two days before I had the courage to face him. And you know what he said?"

"No."

"He said, _I should have moved faster."_ Helion shook his head. "Well, I should have pulled my spear. We both say what we could have done, what we should have done, but his arm will never be the same, and nothing we say will change that. So."

"So simple," she said, and he shrugged.

"It _is_ simple. It's just not easy."

There was more truth in that than anything they had told her in the Temple, and Diana silently curled her fingers into his, looking at his wide, blunt fingers, ragged and calloused from sword and spear and bow. He had grown so tall that they were comfortable sitting together; his arm fit well around her shoulders, and her head rested neatly in the crook of his shoulder.

"I've missed this," he said, low, and she felt his lips brush the top of her head. He was still a little bashful about it; they were too young to be together often without a chaperone, it was considered improper. "I've missed _you."_

"I've missed you, too," she said, though a prickle of unease went up her spine.

"Did you know it's been almost two months since we were last together?" he asked, as mildly as if he were asking about the summer rains.

"I didn't know that," she said, and slipped out of his arms. "I have to get ready for the Temple—"

"No, not yet." He was still pleasant, but there was steel under his voice. "Diana, I know something is wrong. Tell me what it is."

"Nothing's wrong. I—"

"Stop _lying_ to me," he snapped, and her mouth shut in sheer surprise. Helion _never_ snapped. "We have always said truth between us, and if you lie to me just once more, then…then…"

"Then _what?"_ She retorted, stung.

"Then we're done." Helion looked at her steadily, though his voice cracked. "Maybe I shouldn't have spoken when I did. Maybe you need this time at the Temple. I would give you the time; I would be patient. That's what Mother said I should do, be patient. And I would, Diana, but that's not it, is it? There's something else going on and you won't tell me what it is and I will _not_ be lied to!"

The exclamation rang in the grove and the cedars rustled as if they had heard and witnessed it. The taste of bile rose in the back of her throat.

"You can't," she whispered, panic skittering like live mice in her belly. "Helion, I can't—not today. Please. Please don't."

"It will be no better for waiting," he said implacably. "And who knows when I'll see you again?"

It was a cruel cut, and unusual, from him; that he would do it meant she had hurt him deeply. Another day she might have managed all of this better, might have thought of a way to maneuver around this, around him. But now all she could hear was _we're done_ clanging in her ears, the sun rising bright and inexorable toward noon, when she would have to go the Temple, and if she lost Helion she might just run to the Titan's Spear and throw herself off instead.

But if she told him the truth, she would lose him, too.

"All right," she said, and looked away from him. "All right. Tonight. I have to get ready for the Temple, you know I do, if I go looking like this I'll be in trouble again."

"Again?" Helion echoed, his eyes narrowing, and she rushed on before he could ask.

"I'll tell you," she said, her throat tightening. "I will. But…but…" She shook herself, squared her shoulders, and said it clearly. "I'm afraid when I do, you won't love me anymore."

"Oh," he said, and crossed the little glade swiftly to her, took her dirty, bloody hands in his. "Oh. No. No, how could I stop?"

When he kissed her, she could taste the dust of the practice field. The salt of his sweat. And underneath it, there was him, brave and kind and good as the grapes of the rich earth, simple as clear water. His kiss was shy for its newness, awkward for lack of practice, but his arms went around her and there was something new and deep in it, as if they had only been wading along the shore all this time, and suddenly they had turned together and found the whole vast ocean to swim in. It left her breathless, and his voice was husky when he broke it off, pressing his forehead to hers.

"Diana," he said, somber as a funeral orator. "You haven't been beating small children."

"No," she said, puzzled.

"Come on, I'll walk you back." He scooped up her sandals and handed her her armor, her greaves and gauntlets rattling together in his hand. "Have you been dragging beggars back to your kitchen to cook into pies?"

"No," she said again, starting to giggle. He held her hand as they walked up the path, his fingers twined in hers.

"Robbing the old widows of their savings?"

 _"No,"_ she said, bumping him with her hip.

"Are you marrying me to take over my father's pottery business?" At the door to her house, he set down her armor and leaned against the jamb, his eyes twinkling. "Because I won't have anyone that just wants me for my pots."

She was going to make a joke, but something stopped at her. He'd grown broad enough to fill the doorway and the sun shot gold sparks through his bronze hair, glowed on his tanned skin, and all at once she could see the man he would become. The man she would love. She was just beginning to see the outer edges of that love, to understand what it could be, what he would be to her, how impossibly dear.

"It's not your pots," she said, and went into his arms when he held them out to her.

"Tonight." Helion said, and bent to kiss the top of her head. "You promised."

 _Tonight I will lose you,_ she thought, and her heart would break with the sorrow.

"Yes," she forced herself to say. "I'll find you after the Benedictions."

* * *

Domitian walked as fast as his withered, useless left leg would allow, his walking staff clacking loudly on the tiled floor of the Temple. Just past the enormous colonnade at the eastern entrance was the great gathering chamber, a circular room with many doors where the Skaloi, students, acolytes, and Elders congregated in small sitting areas. To the left was the Archives; to the right, the ceremonial chambers and purification pools for the rites of worship. To the rear of the Temple were the wind gardens, meticulously tended gardens that stretched to the very fingertips of the cliffs, hanging over the valley far below.

And down, if you knew where to find the stairs, were the council chambers of the Elders and Skaloi.

He was furious as he had rarely been before, and his first impulse was to go down those stairs, find Skalos Abeon, and shake the scrawny little bastard until his eyes popped.

That, however, would be counterproductive.

Instead he went to Skala Legeia, one of Diana's teachers, who he had known since he was an acolyte himself.

"Tell me why this happened," he said, sitting down at her invitation and waving away the cup of wine she offered. "It was Abeon that began this trouble."

Skala Ligeia was a tall, grave woman who retained a measure of grace even in extreme old age. She poured herself a cup of wine before she spoke, smoothing her long white robes as she sat down in a hard-backed chair opposite him. She sat very straight, her silver hair pulled back in a complex coil with combs of polished quartz.

"He did," she acknowledged. "I knew there was trouble between them. He picked on the girl, it is true. But Domitian, your daughter has earned this punishment."

The older woman was unusually severe, and Domitian felt his stomach knot.

"What happened?"

"She struck him, Domitian." The Skala looked at him, and not without sympathy. "She struck him hard enough to knock him down, and said if she was a moon-mad dog, he ought to stay well away and mind his tongue, oughtn't he? She said if he was her guide down the one true path, she would take the road to hell instead." The Skala's lips twitched. "A poor time for her to find her tongue. Why would Skalos Abeon say she was a moon-mad dog, Domitian? It's a strange insult to choose."

"He was taunting her," Domitian gritted. "Helion, son of Kadmos, is her betrothed. He told me there was an accident at the _agoge_ today. Diana hurt her friend badly. And Abeon called her a mad dog for it."

"A moon-mad dog." Skala Ligeia corrected gently.

"What of it?" He wanted to stand, to pace, as he had when he was young. All these years and still he forgot sometimes that he was a cripple. "What of his treatment of her? Why has he been allowed to do this?"

"We are speaking of Diana now," The Skala replied, but left no doubt that the Skalos would be dealt with. "Striking a teacher is bad enough, but that's not the whole of it. She would be punished, but we would not keep her in the penitent's cell. It was blasphemy, what she said, and it's not the first time."

"She has questions," Domitian said lamely. He had feared this for a very long time.

"She has more than questions, Elder, and I believe you know that quite well."

There was no good answer to that, so he ignored it. "What will happen to her?"

"She will be whipped, of course. In the forecourt tomorrow at noon." The Skala nudged the cup of wine toward him. "Drink. It's not the end of the world, you know."

"It will not help her," he said, ignoring her. "I know my daughter, she—"

"It's about _justice,_ " the older woman said with some asperity. "Heavens, Domitian! I will not deceive you, I have been disappointed in the girl. Such a quick mind, so many gifts! We would make her a _psalta_ tomorrow if she were to join the Temple permanently; Skalos Joras likes to hear her sing, and a voice like hers is rare. She could make us proud no matter what she does. But there are some who say that she is not Solari at all, and their whispers grow louder for her blasphemies. She twists our doctrine. She distorts it. I have heard her do it with my own ears."

"So have I," he whispered, and closed his eyes.

"You knew that she had these thoughts. These blasphemies. And yet you brought her to the temple as an acolyte."

"I thought she would be taught to understand our beliefs, as I was," he said, anger kindling. "Not bullied by some juvenile _jackass_ of a Skaloi."

"I would hope she has restraint enough to endure that, or what manner of warrior will she be? Should we tell her enemies not to taunt her on the battlefield? We priests fight beside our Rakkor brothers. We are armed with spears and shields as well as our faith."

Domitian looked away, defeated. He should have known better than to argue with the Master of Rhetoric. She was right. That was the worst of it. Diana was hardly the first to backtalk a Skaloi or even strike one, but combined with her blasphemy, it was a terrible crime. A whipping was lenient; they had taken Skalos Abeon's provocation into account.

But in his mind's eye he saw her, wrists bound to the wooden pillars in the forecourt and her tunic torn down the back, imagined the bloody stripes crossing her fair skin, and oh, the _shame_ of it. It would burn in her heart for the rest of her life. He knew his proud, strange, lovely daughter, and knew she would bear it like it was a brand in her flesh. She would never forget it. Never forgive it.

"It is my failing," he said gruffly. "I did not teach her as I ought. I will go in her place."

Skala Ligeia blinked.

"My, wouldn't that be a show," she mocked gently. "An Elder of the Fifth Degree between the posts, and a cripple to boot. I think we ought to spare the Temple such a scene if we can, don't you?"

"It will not help her. It will only turn her against you." Domitian lurched to his feet, found his balance. "Against the Temple. It will make the problem _worse,_ Skala. She will think—"

"What she _thinks,"_ Skala Ligeia said sharply, putting her cup aside and standing to face him, "is entirely the problem, Elder. Her punishment is justice. Her blasphemy was witnessed. It is to your credit that you love her as you do, but I must caution you against loving her too much. She must be corrected. You have tried to do so gently. I see that. You have tried to teach her yourself; when you failed, you sent her to the Temple, hoping that we would succeed. Is that not so?"

Whatever he was going to say, it died on his lips at the look that she threw him, the sort of challenge usually issued with spear and shield on the practice field.

"Yes," he was forced to admit.

"She is moon-addled, Domitian," she said, more gently. "Let us help her. You will not see her tonight. I will speak to her instead, and tomorrow you will stand with us. It will show her that you agree with me, that what I have said is true."

"She will think I've abandoned her," he said, appalled.

"No," Skala Ligeia said. "She will think you were the first to help raise her up again, when we cast her down. You will be the one to help her find the one true path, or no one can."

* * *

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 _Author's Note:_

 _Thanks for your patience, most of you. :p If you're enjoying the story, please drop me a line in the reviews; your reviews are what keep me posting._


	5. Chapter 5 Penitent

**Chapter Five**

 **Penitent**

The penitents' cells were deep under the Temple of the Sun.

Roughly cylindrical, they were cut from the stone of Mount Targon itself, radiating out from the Temple like the spokes of a wheel, or the rays from the sun. The Temple had been built on a jutting clifftop that pointed eastward to the sunrise, and all the cells opened onto the outer face of the cliff, bathed in light until the sun passed its zenith.

But what served the sun also served the moon.

It was another blasphemous thought. Diana didn't much care.

She hadn't seen the moon in more than two years.

It broke the eastern horizon enormous and round and full-bellied, and she watched it with eyes that glowed silver, reflecting the light of the moon as surely as it reflected the sun. Maybe this was why she was so pale, she thought; perhaps as a child she walked too many nights in the moonlight, and soaked in its light as surely as Helion soaked in the sun. She could feel it the way she could feel the baking sun at midday, as an almost tangible pressure on her skin. But the moonlight wouldn't burn her. It just whispered against her skin like a cool breeze. In her thin acolyte's tunic, she stood by the window to draw as much in as she could, all of that coolness and light and serenity, against the day ahead.

It soothed her. It calmed her. And the skies above knew she needed soothing. Thoughts of Father and Helion were twin torments, like Tityos and the two vultures in the story. If she had been left in the dark to think about them she would break, and she couldn't afford that, not when everyone would see her tomorrow. She wouldn't go with eyes swollen and reddened by tears. She would not look weak.

It might have been one hour or eight that she basked, with no thought beyond the eastern sky and a peaceful sort of emptiness inside her. They said the moon was cold and lifeless and sterile, but she didn't think of it that way. It was beautiful. It was clean. In all the hours and days she had meditated upon the sun, it had never brought her such peace as this.

So when the bolt on the door of her cell turned with a rusty scraping, she didn't turn, only watched from the corner of her eye as the Master of Rhetoric entered, stooping to get in through the little door.

"Skala," Diana greeted her politely.

"Phila Diana." There was a rough table with a single chair beside the bed, and the Skala sat there with a sigh, as if it were a relief to sit down. "I'd forgotten how many stairs there are under the Temple."

"Perhaps they should have brought me to you then, if you had to speak to me."

"If they had no better sense than to put you in this cell, I agree," the Skala replied. "Come and talk to me, girl. I'm not going to scold you. Much."

Reluctantly, Diana came away from the window, and felt the darkness all the more acutely for it. The single candle on the table sputtered in the breeze and cast a wavering light over Skala Ligeia's face and made the shadows play in every wrinkle and seam around her eyes, her mouth. She knelt on the hard, cold stone at the Skala's feet, the ritual posture of instruction, and waited.

"You will be whipped tomorrow," the Skala said, without preamble. "I expect you already know that."

"Yes," Diana said, tight-lipped. The pain didn't frighten her. She had been hurt at the _agoge_ and the Temple before; for some months, Abeon had developed a particular fondness for having her beaten with a birch rod when he successfully baited her in class. Most often those beatings had been administered by Skalos Kolaphos, who always treated her as a sort of mild imposition, like a fly that had to be swatted. He'd swatted her, and then gotten on with things. But sometimes Skalos Abeon had preferred to do the honors himself, and those had been the worst; not just because she had to submit to the indignity at the hands of a man she despised, but because he had so obviously enjoyed it, and enjoyed provoking her to prolong the punishment. She'd never thought of herself as short-tempered, and had never in her life had such difficulty in controlling herself as she did in Skalos Abeon's presence.

Which was why she was here, and would be whipped in the Temple proper tomorrow. Far worse than the pain was the thought that she would never hear the end of it from the other acolytes, and all her friends at the _agoge_ would hear about it, and oh, Father must be so ashamed.

"Do you understand why?"

"I blasphemed."

"Yes. But do you know why you will be whipped for it, in the forecourt?" The Skala leaned forward, lifting a finger. "Instead of privately by Skalos Kolaphos again."

That made her hesitate. "To…humiliate me," she said finally, and looked away, toward the moon.

"It's a worse punishment, yes," Skala Ligeia agreed. "And, as I told your father, it is justice."

"You spoke to Father?" The question burst out before she could stop it.

"Yes. He will be there tomorrow." The Skala let the words drop like stones down a deep, dark well. Though she tried not to show any emotion, Diana's shoulders slumped. Somehow underneath the fear and anger she'd been thinking Father would stop this somehow, the words _when Father hears about this_ running through her mind as both a terrible torment and desperate hope. He would be angry, he would be embarrassed, but she'd been so _sure_ he would help her.

"He can't come tonight?" she asked, so low the Skala barely heard her.

"No. Though if it's any consolation to you, I suspect that it hurts him worse than it does you."

Diana looked at the floor, feeling tears prickling traitorously in her eyes.

"Your young man also asked to see you," Skala Ligeia went on. "Helion, son of Kadmos. And when we told him no, he asked to send a message. Do you want to hear it?"

"Yes," she said wretchedly.

"He said he understands. He will be there tomorrow, and you will talk later."

"I don't want him there."

"It is a _public_ punishment." The gentle emphasis made Diana's tears overflow, and the old woman laid a hand on her head as she wept silently, bitterly, her shoulders heaving in soundless sobs.

"We are not being cruel needlessly," Skala Ligeia murmured. "And I hope you will look at your father and your betrothed for strength tomorrow. The Rakkor are like a shield wall. We are terrible foes when we fight alone, but we are invincible when we stand together. I know your Skaloi at the _agoge_ have told you this. And there are more reasons than justice for your punishment. Too many people have heard your blasphemies, Diana. We must show them that there is a price to be paid. We must show _you_ that there is a price to be paid."

"I wasn't trying to blaspheme!" Diana scrubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. "Except for the last time, and then I was just mad. I wanted to learn like Father did. If I don't ask questions, how can I learn?"

"Maybe you should try listening, and trusting," the Skala said gently. "I can assure you Elder Domitian never asked a question that made everything fall into place at once. There is no such question."

It sounded good, but for the first time, Diana found a flaw in the Master of Rhetoric's argument. No, there was no single right question. But her teachers couldn't answer any of the wrong ones, either. And it wasn't right, she thought mutinously, that the only answer to her questions was _shut up and stop asking them._ That wasn't knowledge. It wasn't wisdom. It wasn't _truth._

"If there is one true path," she said aloud, "then there should be _reasons_ why the other paths are false. I'm asking about those reasons, in the end."

"There _is_ one true path," the Skala corrected her. "You are not the first to question it, and certainly not the first to have difficulty following it. But will you insist on following the wrong one all the way to its bitter end to find that out, and all the way the rest of us are warning you that it's wrong, it's dangerous? That seems to me a very foolish thing to do."

"How do you know if everyone's forbidden from asking? Everyone says the moon makes men mad, or fools, but where did that come from? Father told me about the ice-maidens when I was little, and how we used to leave milk and flowers on the doorstep for them to ask for a mild winter. They would drink the milk and wear the flowers in their hair, and it would make them long for spring to come sooner. They're not real, but if everyone still believed they were we'd still be leaving milk on the doorstep, and saying the ice-maidens had been at it when it was frozen in the morning."

"We have no evidence for the existence of ice-maids," Skala Ligeia said. "But we do have evidence of what comes of chasing the moon." She sat silent for a moment, her soft, almost nonexistent eyebrows drawn down over her eyes. Diana found herself holding her breath without knowing quite why. "No," the Skala said at length. "No, I will not tell you. It seems to me it would do more harm than good."

"But—"

 _"No,_ Phila Diana. I said you must learn to listen, and trust. And so you will. Later, you will come to this knowledge. You have my word. But to give it to you now would be like giving iron to the littlest wolf cubs at the _agoge._ "

"I'm not a child." Diana said, exasperated.

"You are a child in matters of our faith." Skala Ligeia stood carefully, brushing her white robes with her hands. "You will be a child still for a great many years. I want you to answer one question for me. Do you believe that I am trying to do what is best for you?"

Diana looked away. The moon was still rising, it would only be visible through the window for another hour or so.

"Yes," she admitted grudgingly.

"Then let me," the Skala said. "I will have you moved elsewhere tonight; this is not a good place for you. Sing your Devotions and your Benedictions, sing your sleep-songs. It will do you good, and the rest of us will like to hear it. There are many ways to serve."

"Yes, Skala," Diana said, shoulders slumping at the thought of another night in the dark.

"May the light increase," the old woman said softly, and laid a hand on her shoulder. "How bright you could be in it, child."

"May the light increase," Diana repeated back, with some irony. After all, an acolyte was coming soon to take her to a place where the light couldn't touch her.

* * *

Domitian dressed as solemnly as he would have for a funeral.

His sandals were cleaned, the dark leather shining. His gold cloak was freshly laundered, his white tunic impeccable. He wore his best belt, studded with leather and bronze, a gift from Diana. His beard had been combed and oiled and curled from his chin to his chest. He examined his reflection for some time, marking the lines in his face, the lines radiating outward from the corners of his eyes. The Solari called those rays, and said they were the places the sun had traced its touch over the years.

He marked also the shadows under his eyes. He had talked for a long time with the boy Helion, late into the night, simultaneously comforting and being comforted. The boy was hurt and angry that Diana had kept so much from him, and more, he was trying to reconcile this Diana with the girl he had imagined her to be. It was hard when idols fell, and no mortal woman could have reached the pedestal on which Helion had placed Diana.

But Domitian wasn't worried about the boy. He would be proud, one day, to call him his son. No, the trouble would be with Diana. Moon-madness aside, she was a proud girl. Perhaps too proud. She had been excellent for too long, she had been the standard against which all the other girls in the _agoge_ measured themselves. It would be hard for her to be humbled this way.

The walk to the Temple was short, but it felt an eternity. He was sure he felt eyes on him, heard whispers, or worse, heard conversations stop short as he walked through the Temple Heights, but he was a man of the Rakkor and remembered his iron face well. He stood straight, his eyes focused on the steps ahead of him, then the great Temple doors, then the long colonnade to the forecourt, open to the sky. The many-rayed sun on his mantle rode well on his wide shoulders and he walked with dignity for all that he leaned heavily on his walking staff.

Domitian had timed it well; the crowd was already assembled there, standing on the wide steps with the wide stone tiles of the courtyard emptied. At one end stood all the Elders and Skaloi. Skalos Joras was chief among them, Skala Ligeia a step down and to his right. Elder Pyrphoros, ruinously ancient but still as cunning as ever, was seated in a chair in deference to his age, but leaned forward, squinting as he looked for people he knew.

"Stand beside me, Elder," he barked at Domitian as he came near. "Hard day, I know, but you'll bear up. So will she! Mark my words, there's iron in your girl! A credit to you."

"Thank you, Elder," Domitian said dutifully. He appreciated the sentiment, but wished it hadn't been spoken quite so loudly. It was an effort not to look around the crowd, to find faces he knew; to see Diana's teachers, _his_ teachers, some of them, looking stern or censorious. To avoid the eyes of his brother and sister Elders, most of which would be sympathetic, but a few—Hadrian, Calpurnia, and Ioanthe, in particular—who would be quietly rejoicing at his fall. Even among religious men, even among scholars, or perhaps _especially_ among religious men and scholars, there was a great deal of politicking, and skirmishes for position and favor were constant. This weakened him, and he would be a fool to deny it.

It was a galling thing, and he tried not to think about it now. Now, he must be there for his daughter. Skala Ligeia was right. This would be hard, but if Diana were to find her way to faith, she must suffer this. And this time he would do right by her, Domitian swore to himself.

At the top of the steps on all sides, behind the higher-ranking Skaloi and Elders, the acolytes murmured and whispered among themselves, and he saw some satisfaction there, some of the same ugly pleasure in Diana's misfortune that was so distasteful on Hadrian's face. But he also saw Helion, dusty in his armor and broad enough to command some respect. And, if he wasn't mistaken, that was Diana's friend Kallista beside the boy, near as tall as he was and lean as a string bean.

The boy had brought Diana's friends with him, Domitian thought, seeing other young men and women in their armor in the shadows behind him, and closed his eyes briefly in gratitude. Today, Diana would hate it, but in the days to come she would be glad. This was a show of support for her from the _agoge._ It would make troublesome Temple acolytes think twice.

The wide golden doors with their many-rayed insignia of the sun opened, and they brought her out. Diana wasn't bound or manacled or anything so melodramatic and unnecessary as that, but she was flanked by two older acolytes of imposing size, all of them clad in white. Her tunic was dusty and her belt a simple rope wrapped many times around her narrow wait: the marker for where the whipping must end. The base of the spine was nearly as fragile as the nape of the neck. He knew that well, to his own cost.

That she was barefoot made her seem strangely vulnerable to Domitian's eyes, even more vulnerable than she was without her armor and spear.

"Diana, daughter of Domitian, Elder of the Fifth Degree of the Solari," boomed Skalos Joras, his impressive voice bouncing off the stones of the courtyard. "You are guilty of blaspheming the doctrine of the Solari. You are brought before the Elders and Skaloi of the Temple and your peers to bear the punishment. Do you have anything to say on your own behalf?"

It was hard sometimes to remember that she was a fourteen now, and soon full grown; pale and exhausted, but her face was iron and her arms and legs were striped with pale white scars, a legacy of her time in the _agoge._ She was very nearly a woman, and a Rakkor warrior, and though in his worst imaginings he had thought of her weeping, crying out under the whip, he knew she would endure it.

"I am sorry," she said simply in answer, and followed the acolytes to the two posts, lifting her hands without prompting to be bound. But she did look at the crowd, and Domitian saw the shock of recognition when she found Helion and Kallista and her friends behind them. _It will force her to be strong,_ he thought, as she looked stoically away from them. She did not look for Domitian. She already knew he was there.

"For your blasphemy, you will have thirty lashes," Skalos Joras said. "We encourage you to contemplate your crime and see where you have erred, that this need never happen again."

"I will."

"Heard and witnessed," said the Skalos. "May the light increase."

"May the light increase," the crowd echoed, and that was that.

The whipping was administered by Skalos Kolaphos, a barrel-chested man of middle age who had come late to the Temple after many years in the Rakkor army. His hair was thinning and well-salted with gray, but there was nothing wrong with the strength of his arm. He did the duties of his office with all proper solemnity and a great deal of skill. Domitian didn't know the man well, but had heard that he was strangely gentle; entrusted with the care of the Temple's livestock when he wasn't whipping acolytes, he had an almost magical touch with beasts and wouldn't hear of any brutality to even the balkiest mule.

The courtyard was silent as he stepped forward, uncoiled the whip, and shook it out. He nodded.

One of the acolytes standing beside Diana tore her tunic down the back to the waist. Unlike her arms and legs, her back was pure white and unblemished, her skin like cream. There were no scars on her back, and never would be. Diana faced her enemies.

Against his will, Domitian jerked when the first lash cracked, and the first red welt appeared on that creamy skin. Across the courtyard he could see Helion watch with his lips pressed so tight together they almost disappeared, his face pale under his tan, but by the heavens, Domitian could watch as stoically as the boy could. He didn't move with the second lash, or the third, and Diana was silent, her hands clenched into fists and her eyes set like two stars burning silver.

On the tenth lash, she began to bleed, the red terribly vivid against her white skin, her white tunic. Skalos Kalophos laid the stripes with the precision of a chirurgeon, spaced neatly a finger's width apart from just below the nape of her neck to just above her waist, but thirty lashes was thirty lashes. Her skin welted and then split under the slashing leather.

She never budged. Except for the blood, the Skalos might have been whipping a statue for all the reaction she showed. And Domitian was so proud of her for that, but in his mind she was still a little girl, the child of his heart, bearing pain that made grown men cry out in other, lesser lands. Every lash was for Domitian a reminder of _his_ failure; he must have failed dreadfully for her to come to this. Diana was bleeding because he hadn't taught her well, he had loved her too much to correct her as he should have, and now she was paying the price. It was the worst part of being a parent: that _he_ would not be the one to suffer for the mistakes he'd made.

Blood pattered onto the stones, soaked the back of her tunic, rolled down the back of her thighs in beads. Her face went white, but still she said nothing. Not a sound escaped her. And Domitian wished vindictively that Skalos Abeon were here, because if he had witnessed this, he would be shamed. _This_ was the girl he had thought to test and bully, and the Skalos wasn't fit to polish her sandal leather.

"Thirty," said Skalos Kolaphos, his voice loud in the silent courtyard, and he stepped back, pulling a cloth from his belt to begin wiping the blood from the whip.

The applause was genuine, even if it was grudging from a few quarters. They did not cheer and their faces were as still and cold as hers, which was, in its way, a compliment to her. They did not rejoice at this punishment. No one's heart was gladdened by it. They were here to observe justice as coldly and dispassionately as any blind judge, and that justice having been done, they applauded her courage and stoic endurance of pain. She was, as far as the Solari and Rakkor were concerned, forgiven.

"Thank you, Skalos Kolaphos," Skalos Joras said, and stepped forward again. "Phila Diana, you have made amends for your crime. You are forgiven in the eyes of the Temple and the Solari. Let no man speak against you."

"Heard and witnessed," said the crowd, and Domitian hoped it would be true.

He could see her hands shaking when they untied her, her wrists red from the leather thongs, and her knees wobbled once as she turned with the acolytes to walk back to the courtyard doors, where she would be taken immediately to a chirurgeon. They had tied up all her silvery hair on top of her head, but a few strands had come loose—Diana had bemoaned the fineness of her hair since she was a child; it never _would_ stay where she put it—and were damply red, making fine whorling patterns on her bloody shoulders.

Domitian didn't see the rest leaving, and only vaguely acknowledged Skala Ligeia and Skalos Joras. His eyes were on the bloody flagstones where Diana had stood, and in his mind he said it again with the force of an oath: it should have been him there. He had failed her.

And by the Four Faces of the sun, by the eastern sun victorious, he would not fail her again.

* * *

Diana tolerated a single day of convalescence before she rebelled.

It was as much against Father as it was the chirurgeons. Her father had been…different, somehow, since the flogging. Distant. Facing him when he came to take her home was worse than the whipping; she had been utterly unable to meet his eyes, but for once Domitian hadn't forced the issue.

She had expected him to. She expected him to be disappointed, maybe even angry, but—and it was embarrassing to admit it, but still true—she'd also expected him to take care of her, afterward. Somewhere in the back of her mind, where the child Diana still lived, that child remembered the days she'd been home sick when she was little, and Domitian had hovered and fussed as much as any stoic Rakkor man was capable of fussing.

That Domitian would have interrogated the chirurgeons. He would have informed Diana in no uncertain terms that she was to stay in her bed, the maids would do the fetching and carrying. He would have been silently, constantly present, rustling in the hallway below the stairs, listening to everything she said to the maids, listening for every grunt of pain, every restless tug of the bedclothes.

Instead, when they got home, he told her to go to bed, went to his study, and shut the door.

The maids brought her food and drink and she lay as still as she could because anything else hurt. Where the whip weals had crossed each other, some of the cuts were deep, and she felt like a poorly constructed patchwork quilt, with stitches in twos and threes at odd places on her back. It was especially bad around her ribs, where the flesh was thin and the whip had tended to curl, striking the same sore spots over and over again.

It was amazing how much you used your back. You never realized it until you had to try, on pain of…well, more pain, _not_ to use it.

For one day she lay in her bed and healed. Truthfully, she was waiting for her father to call her to an accounting. But he never did.

So the next day, she went out.

It was pouring rain, she forgot her cloak, but she wasn't going back for it. She really had no idea where she was going; she wasn't fit for the _agoge_ and wasn't ready to face her friends _en masse_ in any case. The shame was still too fresh to face any large group of Rakkor, and certainly not any Solari of the Temple. The thought of the Temple—the other acolytes, the Skaloi, especially Skalos Abeon—made fury flare like a bonfire, and she stalked determinedly in the opposite direction, down the clifftop trails to the south side of the village near the pass. Her hair was plastered to her head and she was just starting to shiver in the chilly rain when she realized where she was, where her legs had carried her without any conscious thought of her own.

Lelia's father was a woolens merchant, and their house was one of the larger homes, two stories tall with a gleaming Four-Facing Sun on the pinnacle of the roof, and a fine courtyard. For a long minute, Diana stood and contemplated the front door, the rain trickling down the back of her neck and dripping off the end of her nose. Then she stiffened her spine and knocked on the door.

She didn't know what she expected from Lelia's mother; she half-expected to be hit, or to have the door slammed in her face. But Osteria Kirikaios had been a warrior herself, and only looked Diana up and down for a second, her eyes—Lelia's eyes—flat and unreadable.

"You're going to get mud all over my tile," she said. "Go on, you know where Lelia's room is."

Diana did know. She had spent many hours there as a child, dismissed from the women's quarters because Osteria couldn't weave with two screeching little girls in the room. She climbed the stairs, gritting her teeth as her stitches pulled, and knocked on Lelia's door.

"Come."

She pushed the door open and stood, dripping, in the doorway. Lelia was in bed, working on some small bit of sewing with a frown puckering her visible eyebrow. The left eye, from the bridge of her nose to her cheek, was hidden behind a thick swath of white bandages, her hair waving past her shoulders loose in a torrent of ruddy gold.

"I'm sorry," Diana said finally. The words were entirely inadequate, but they had to be said.

Lelia looked up, regarded Diana with her beautiful right eye.

"You thought a good penance would be to get soaking wet and catching your death of cold?" she asked dryly, and patted the furs on her bed. "Come on, sit down. It's going to give me a crick in my neck to look up at you."

"Helion said the doctors thought they could save your eye," Diana said. She could hardly stand to look at her friend, but it was her fault; she could at least have the courage to face what she'd done.

"They thought they could," Lelia agreed. "They had to take it last night."

"Oh," Diana whispered, and sat down on the bed, her back prickling with the movement, a wash of stinging, burning pain that was like thousands of biting ants. Rakkor ants in thornmail, stabbing with tiny spears.

"Turn around, let me see. Kallista told me you were going to be whipped."

If it would make her feel better. Diana obeyed, pulled her wet plait of hair over her shoulder. Bandages covered the worst of the marks, but there were still long stripes laid over and between her shoulder blades, red and angry. Behind her, she heard Lelia sit up, and then felt her finger prodding painfully at a lash mark. Diana didn't flinch. If it would have given Lelia her eye back, she would have suffered a dozen floggings.

"Looks like it hurts," Lelia observed, and settled back on her pillow. "Was it worth it?"

"Worth what?" Diana turned toward her, crossing one sandaled foot over her knee to keep from dripping on the bed, and winced as her stitches tugged.

"Beating Skalos Abeon. Blaspheming."

She was about defend herself when she saw Lelia's lips twitching, and she laughed, short and sharp. "Beating Abeon was. I'd take another whipping for that."

"You know what he said was a lie. It's not your fault. My eye."

Diana looked away. "I was tired. You could've kept maneuvering forever. I knew I would lose if I let you, and I wasn't going to lose. So I went too far."

"But that's what we _do."_ Lelia pushed her sewing aside. "I went to see Clytemne, after you told us what she was doing. I just wanted to ask her what the problem was. Let her know that you weren't alone up there, that the _agoge_ stood with you. She asked how I could be friends with some outland orphan brat. You couldn't be Rakkor, she said, and if you were, you were still a disgrace to the Solari."

"Maybe she's right." Diana shifted. "Whipped for blasphemy."

"Well, you're sorry for it, aren't you? Kallista said you didn't make a sound." Lelia punched her shoulder, grinning. "But who's Clytemne to say you're not Rakkor? Some soft Temple bitch, that's all. You didn't quit when we were fighting, and you shouldn't have. You found a way to win, no matter what. That's what we do. That's what we are. This," Lelia said, flicking her fingers toward her bandaged eye. "What's this? I've got another eye. I am Rakkor. I can still carry my shield and my spear. I can still shoot my bow."

"You are iron," Diana said finally, her throat tight.

 _"We_ are iron," Lelia corrected her, holding out a hand, and they clasped wrists as if it were an agreement between them. "And these are the things that we do."


	6. Chapter 6 An Elegant Argument

**Chapter Six**

 **An Elegant Argument**

By the time Diana arrived home later that afternoon, she felt as if she were being inexpertly skinned by a novice hunter.

Every step pulled at a different piece of her back and she wouldn't have been surprised to find the tender flesh coming apart in patches and strips. She breathed shallowly through her teeth and kept her shoulders so ridged they nearly trembled, balancing on the back of her heels to keep from pulling on her stitches. Surely it didn't hurt as bad now as when she'd been actually whipped, but in the space of two days she seemed to have forgotten that pain, and there was only the eternal now, passing one excruciating step at a time. She wanted nothing more than to crawl up to her bedroom, lie down on her belly, and never move again.

But her father had other plans.

Within the slightly ridiculous colonnade on the front of their house was a small sitting area, facing the south with several wide hearths for fires. It was a good place to sit with guests when the weather was fine, especially since between them Diana and Domitian had filled every other space in the house with books and scrolls. Domitian was sitting straight-backed and severe on one of the benches, dressed in his gold cloak for the Benedictions. His eyes were darkly shadowed and Diana remembered again that he was growing old, nearer now to seventy than sixty. She remembered it like finding an unwelcome visitor on the doorstep, or a swarm of silverfish in an old book, a thought that she cast swiftly away, repulsed.

"Father," she said, surprised to see him there. He marked his place in his book with a finger and looked up.

"Diana," he said. "I did not expect you to be out of your bed today."

"I went to see Lelia," she said.

"How is she?"

"She lost her eye." Diana's voice thickened, and she looked at the ceiling, working to clear the tightness in her throat away. "Last night."

"We train with iron," Father said, when she had mastered herself. It was no more comforting now than it was when Helion said it, and there was a grim quality to Father's voice that she didn't like at all. "Come and sit. Since you are better, there are things we need to discuss."

It was not in her to complain about pain, but at the moment she felt that _better_ was a wild exaggeration. _And he should see it,_ she thought, bewildered, but sat down in the chair facing him. It was tall enough that she didn't need to bend to sit, and had no back that might accidentally press against her.

"Discuss what?" she asked, with foreboding.

"What we will do next." Something in his bearing reminded her that he wasn't just her father, but an Elder of the Fifth Degree. There were only two dozen others that could call themselves his equal in all the Solari; perhaps a dozen could call themselves his superior. "Do you feel your punishment was just?"

"My punishment—" Her eyes flicked to his. This was not the way she had wanted to talk to him about it. She had planned to apologize, to confess what she had said and done and thought and beg pardon, but he caught her wrong-footed. She stuttered. "Y-yes. I was wrong. I wanted to apol—"

"Your apology is not due to me," he interrupted. "I heard you apologize for your blasphemy, and I know you meant it. But that isn't the whole of it. You and I know it isn't."

"No," she said, low. Her stomach knotted.

"You are moon-witted." He said it matter-of-factly, the same way he would have stated that she was a girl, or had gray eyes. "You have been for as long as I have known you. The moon calls you no less today than it did when you were four years old. And you have been spared the consequences of it, though at every turn you have questioned and distorted and perverted the doctrine of the Solari. Yet the Temple spared you. I… _I_ have spared you, all these years. Is it not so?"

She looked at the tile floor, muddy and splashed from the rain.

"Yes," she whispered.

"So I ask you again. Do you feel your punishment was just?"

The tears that pain alone couldn't wring from her welled, and fell, clear drops only a little more colorless than her eyes.

"No, father."

"I have tried everything I know to help you. I sent you to the Temple, that they might succeed where I failed." He was building an argument, as expertly as the Master of Rhetoric: a solid wall of logic unassailable, stone by stone. "We have all failed. I do not say you are the only one at fault. But you are growing worse, not better."

"I _tried,_ Father!" She burst out miserably. "I tried to understand like you said, but—"

He lifted a hand to silence her, and it was as good as a slap.

"You _never_ tried to understand," he said, and his sharp blue eyes met hers, keen and cutting as a sword. "You twisted everything you heard, Diana. You sought always to negate it, to unmake it. Every time Skalos Abeon spoke, you heeded the voice in you that said it wasn't true, or it wasn't _all_ true, or that this other thing might also be true. The man is a fool and a bully, but he was correct in his doctrine. Every piece of the evidence you were given, you distorted, and then complained that you could not fit the pieces together. Is it not so?"

She could not speak. She nodded, her breath shuddering.

"So we will try something else. Your Skaloi cannot stop to correct you when you do this. They have others to teach. I will again be your teacher. I will correct you."

A few hours ago this would have filled her with joy, but Father was so strange, so fierce and harsh and distant at the same time, that she felt only dread, as if her insides had been flash-frozen in a blizzard.

"Father," she said desperately, "I'm sorry. I am. For all of it. I will try, I really will—"

"Words are wind," he said, suddenly weary. "We will begin tomorrow. You will not be returning to the Temple to study. You will only go to fulfill your duties as an acolyte."

She wasn't at all sorry about that, though it would mean she spent more time polishing mirrors; students were excused from some duties to give time for their studies. But what he said next made her feel it would have been a small price to pay if Skalos Abeon had been appointed to personally oversee the mirror polishing.

"You also will not return to the _agoge."_

She gaped at him.

"This is more important, and I do not want anything to distract you. I have sent for a tutor to continue your training with the spear. You will not fall behind."

"But my friends," she said, her voice cracking.

"You will still see them, sometimes. I am not doing this to be cruel to you. And Helion has my permission to continue calling. He is a good boy. You chose well."

 _Helion chose poorly,_ she thought, covering her face with her hands and breathing slow and deep to keep from sobbing aloud. The _agoge_ was the only good thing in her life. To think of them training without her, to watch Parthas and Ereon walk by her window every morning and know she wouldn't follow them…

"When will I see them?"

"You will see Helion tonight, after the Benediction." Father looked toward the Temple Heights at the bottom of the hill, where the great mirrors were already being moved into position. His face was remote. "The others…we will see."

"Father," she began, without any idea of what she was going to say. "I will try. But please, they're my _friends,_ I will fight beside them one day. I will—"

"Endanger them all with your madness." Father shook his head. "As you did Helion, when you were twelve. Oh, my daughter, can't you _see_ how dangerous this is? Can't you understand that I'm trying to spare you from worse?"

His voice quavered and that was the stroke that undid her, worse than anything else he might have said.

"I will!" She sobbed, and threw herself into his arms as she had done when she was a child, heedless of the pain of her patchwork skin. "Father, I will try, I promise, I—"

But he caught her elbows and held her away, his face working painfully.

 _"Show_ me," he said, his hands squeezing her elbows. "This is first. It must be first. Do you agree?"

She nodded, her tears blinding her.

"We will leave for the Benedictions soon." He let her go and lurched to his feet, his staff clattering on the tiles. "Go wash your face."

* * *

Helion was acting oddly.

If she hadn't spent all her tears in the conversation with Father, it would have frightened her more; as it was, she just noted it with a weary sort of resignation. They were sitting together in the cedar grove, Helion fresh-scrubbed after the day's practice, his golden skin glowing in the last of the daylight, his bronze hair curled over his forehead.

"I thought you were," he said frankly when she told him she was moon-addled. It was the equivalent of confessing she was a drunkard or a whore, but he took it in stride. "When your father told me you were being whipped for blasphemy, I put it all together."

"All _what_ together?" she asked, surprised.

His blue eyes were darting around the grove, narrowing as he searched the cedars. He was putting a good face on it, she thought, but he wanted to be away. Of course he did. The Solari had no tolerance for the foolish fancies of moon-witted madwomen.

"You, going to the Temple," he said absently. "And being so determined to stay there, even though they were treating you badly. And that thing you said, about needing to understand _why_ the sun is the way it is. And you watch the moon a lot. I don't think anyone else has ever noticed, at least not that they've said, but I—well, I've had occasion to watch you." He flashed a quick smile at her and stood. He was a lanky boy, all long legs and big feet.

"Doesn't it bother you?" Diana would normally stand to follow him, and look at whatever it was he was looking at, but her whole body was a thumping ache and she found that if she sat absolutely still without moving at all, it was just tolerable. It even hurt to breathe, but she reckoned there was no way out of doing that.

Helion straightened, looking slightly flustered.

"Yes." His blue eyes were always so direct; it was something she loved about him, that he made no pretenses, that he had no fear of telling her precisely what he was thinking. "It's terrible. I hate it. But your father said he was going to help you. I'll help you, if I can."

And with that, he went back to scrutinizing the cedar roots.

"Are you looking for something?" she asked, with an edge to her voice. She was tired, she hurt, she'd had to nerve herself up to say the words _I'm moon-addled_ through the entire Benedictions, and he wasn't at all shocked or upset. She had expected him to be angry. She had expected him to leave her. How could he not? She was nothing now. She was no one's hero, no one's exemplar. No one would point at Diana, blasphemer of the Temple, publically flogged for her crime, and say, _there is the champion of the_ agoge. If they pointed at her at all, it would be with scorn, or worse, with pity.

They would pity Helion for being with her. They would think him trapped by promises of betrothal he had never made. They would shake their heads and say it was a shame, that so promising a boy was stuck with _her,_ the moon-mad dog of the Temple Heights.

"It must have gotten away," Helion said finally, sounding dismayed.

 _"What_ got away?" she demanded. She had worked herself into an agony of anger and humiliation and tears were standing out like hot pinpricks in her eyes. She just wanted to go home.

But Helion startled the life out of her with a sudden whoop, darting into the shadows at the far end of the cedar grove and flinging himself flat as if he were tackling a fleeing enemy on the practice field. She leaped to her feet, her back yanking taut with a surge of hot agony like a whip snapping.

"Helion, _what—"_

"I got it!" He shouted triumphantly, bounding back to his feet and clutching whatever it was to his chest. It was so dark that she could only see his tunic clearly, the white now streaked with grass stains and cedar needles. For all his other charms, Helion's one significant failing was that he never could keep tidy. She knew his mother still gave him a final looking-over before he left the house, but half the time he still managed to rip, stain, and wrinkle whatever he was wearing between his own house and Diana's.

She had the impression of a squirming bundle in his arms and saw his grin, wide and bright as the noonday sun, before he shoved whatever it was into her hands.

"What—where in Valoran did you find a _poro?!"_ The wiggling beast turned around and swiped half her face with its tongue, and she couldn't help it, she started laughing. "Helion!"

He was laughing too, delighted with the success of his joke. "I've had it for almost a month now, I got it off a trader. He almost gave it away; he had six and they were tearing the rest of his merchandise apart." He rubbed the poro's head roughly. "It's yours."

Everything in her melted at once.

"For me?" she breathed, and lifted it up to look at the ridiculous little creature's face. It was panting and warm under its white fur, almost hot despite the cold night. It had little legs with cloven hooves like a mountain goat, and the goat's horns, but the short-bodied poro was as magical as the creatures of Ionia or the Shadow Isles. Its dark eyes gleamed and she snuggled her cheek against its head. Its fur was softer than sheepskin.

"Yes," Helion said, softer, watching her pet and cuddle the creature. The Rakkor bred strong, fierce women, and Diana was stronger than most, but it meant she rarely got to indulge herself over something so silly and girlish. "Do you like it?"

"I love it." She stood on tiptoe to kiss him firmly on the lips. "I love it! What's it's name?"

"My mother called it 'that idiotic little white thing.'" Helion bent and pulled the shreds of a canvas bag from under the bench, examining it. The scraps of canvas were soggy with slobber and ripped by little teeth marks; clearly the poro had chewed its way free.

"Well, I don't like that." She sat down on the bench again, carefully, holding the poro in her lap. "I have to think about it. He needs a good name. Is it a he?"

Helion shrugged, sitting next to her, his arm looped loosely around her waist, careful not to hurt her. "Who knows? How do you check a poro for that?"

"He looks like a he," she said decisively. The poro sat contentedly on her lap as she stroked his fuzzy body, rubbed her fingers over the ridges of his short, curving horns. It somehow made it easier to tell Helion the next thing she needed to say. "Father says I won't be coming back to the _agoge,_ Helion."

His head jerked up and he pulled his hand away from the poro, where he had been tickling his chin. _"Why?"_

"I have to focus on my studies."

"You still need to train for the Rite," Helion said, his eyes narrowing. He rarely got angry, but he was getting angry now. "All your studies won't do you much good if you're slaughtered on the solstice."

"Father sent for a tutor so I won't fall behind." She picked up the poro and inhaled the scent of his fur, cool and somehow sharply green, like he had fallen out of a snowy pine tree. She felt a sort of bitter vindication that Helion was angry, that she had been right that he would be.

"It's not right," Helion said stubbornly, with an angry jerk of his chin, and it fell to her to explain Father's reasoning, laying out the argument as squarely as he had. It took time, and the moon was two hours over the horizon by the time they were done talking. It was only a day past full and still swelled enormous, dominating the night sky. To Diana, the phases of the moon were like watching a familiar face look away from her, and then turn back again, like the glowing silhouette of Helion's profile, the beloved bones of his cheek and jaw and forehead.

The moon made it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. Arguments always tended to tangle on her tongue when she tried to say them aloud, but the moon made it worse. She trailed off more than once into silence, her eyes flicking irresistibly to the sky, her face lit white and shining as it reflected the moonlight.

And that, more than any of Father's clever arguments, convinced Helion.

"Look at me," he said, when she trailed off into silence again, and he took in her eyes, the pupils shrunk to pin-pricks, the silver-blue of her irises glowing. He didn't like it. It made him uncomfortable, it was as shameful as watching a drunk stumbling his way home, and he stood and moved away from her a few paces.

"Maybe your father is right." He said aloud.

"He usually is," she said, embarrassed. She knew why he had gotten up.

He blew out a breath, the way he did before they were about to tackle some impossible exercise in the _agoge._ "It's bad, isn't it? I guess I didn't really think about what it meant before."

"I've been moon-witted since I was four," she said softly, feeling that traitorous lump re-form in her throat. "Father has tried everything he knows. He sent me to be an acolyte to try to cure me. We have tried for ten years, Helion. So…so if you…" she swallowed hard and forced it out. "I'll understand if you don't want to be together anymore."

He was quiet, and he didn't look at her. He was thinking about it, she thought, and nuzzled the poro again. She should give him back, too, even if Helion's mother wouldn't like it; she shouldn't take gifts from Helion if he wasn't going to be her betrothed anymore. But unless Helion demanded it, she wouldn't.

"No," he said finally. "No. I love you. And you love me."

The way he said it, it was a question, and she set her poro down on the bench and went to him swiftly.

"I do love you," she said, and didn't even flinch when he held her hard, her face pressed against his chest. "I do, oh, so much! But I'm…I'm dangerous to you, and I will try, but what if…"

"We do not plan to _fail,"_ he said severely, in such a good imitation of Skalos Grakos that she giggled in spite of everything. "Your father will help you, and I'll help you, and I know if you tell them Kallista and Lelia will help you. You should tell them, Diana, really."

"Maybe I will," she said, and closed her eyes to breathe the clean scent of him. "I will try. I swear it."

And for a little while, she didn't notice the moon, didn't notice anything at all but Helion. He was getting much better at kissing.

"Your poro got away," Helion whispered, his lips moving against hers, and her fingers curled in his. Sure enough, the bench was empty, and she could hear a cheerful sort of panting from the other end of the grove.

"Then we'd better go find him," she whispered back.

* * *

She paid for her adventuring the next morning.

The first time she tried to get up, her body flatly refused. It was the strangest experience, the first solid evidence she had that there was a real dividing line between her body and her spirit, the conscious thing that called itself Diana. Diana said get up, but the flesh refused absolutely.

Father called her again, and Wilhelm (she had decided the poro, being a creature of the Freljord, ought to have a proper Avarosan name) licked her nose in an encouraging way as she tried again, groaning aloud at the sheet of agony that was her back. She might have even pulled a stitch or two, she thought, holding herself in a rigid half-crouch. She was afraid to lie back down and afraid to straighten up.

"Father, can I stay in bed today?" she called raggedly, without much hope.

"You have work at the Temple," was the remorseless reply, and she made her mincing, painful way to her chest for a fresh tunic, sourly noting the bloodstains on the back of the old one. Lifting her arms to pull it off, and then pull on the new tunic, was a whole new fresh hell.

She scooped up Wilhelm on the way out, feeding him a poro snack from the pouch on her desk. Helion had warned her that her poro, being something between a goat and a dog, would eat anything— _anything,_ he had stressed, waving the ragged remains of the canvas bag—and was liable keep eating until someone stopped him.

She had learned on her own that he was a shameless little beggar, and that his large, limpid dark eyes were hard to resist.

But poros were also famously loyal, and Wilhelm proved it on the stairs, hopping them one at a time to keep pace with her as she made her way down the steps to the kitchen. Father was already at the table eating a bit of bread and olive oil.

"Father, look," she said, holding her hands out for Wilhelm, who bounded into them with the spring-loaded bounce of a mountain goat. "Look what Helion gave me!"

"A poro," Domitian leaned forward to examine the little creature, but stayed out of licking range. "How did the boy come by a poro?"

"He got it from a trader at the pass." She sat down carefully, putting Wilhelm on the bench beside her. "I named him Wilhelm. I can keep him, can't I?"

"He will be your responsibility," Father said sternly. "I won't have him in my study or among my books, chewing them up."

"No, father," she said, and started to reach for the jam, but then thought the better of it. Stretching her arms in any way made her shoulders shriek. She didn't know how she was going to do her chores at the Temple.

As it turned out, it was through sheer bloody-minded determination. The other acolytes ignored her; for a time she would be in disgrace, for all that Skalos Joras had proclaimed her forgiven by the Temple. As long as it was silent disgrace, she could endure it. Elder Phaeton, a lean and ascetic man who was as exacting as his precise equations proscribing the position and angle of his mirrors, might have taken pity on her when he assigned her the largest mirrors. They could be cleaned with long sweeps of her arms rather than the endless small circling motion required by the round and concave mirrors.

They moved the mirrors into place for the Salutation ceremony, and then moved them back to the storeroom, giving them another polish as if they hadn't just been cleaned to perfection an hour before. Elder Phaeton only let them go when every mirror was accounted for, lined up in its place, and tested with a bit of white cloth to make sure not a speck of dust lingered on any of the surfaces.

Then, she went home, to begin her studies with her father.

There was none of the chatter that had marked her early learning, the easy back-and-forth as they went through her simple books and scrolls. He had taught her her letters in the dirt, she remembered, scratching them into the sides of the mountain paths they had walked when she was a little girl, or into the snow, or into the ashes of their hearth once. Domitian had found opportunities for learning in the flight of birds, the puffs of cloud that sometimes rolled up their sides of the mountain, even in the sudden shift of the wind.

"Sit," he said when she came into his study, closing the door on a whimpering Wilhelm. Domitian made a fuss over ensuring she had water, that she wasn't hungry, that she had been to the toilet, that her chair was as comfortable as could be expected. There would be no interruptions. She folded her hands in her lap, watching him with some trepidation.

"The faces of the sun," he said.

"The bleeding sun, which is the winter sun from the south. The sleeping sun, that is to the west, the fall. The northern—"

But Father had already held up his hand.

"One at a time. You said the bleeding sun, which is the winter sun. Why do we call it the bleeding sun?"

"Because in the winter, our part of the continent is tilted away from the sun, so its light is less direct," she said, demonstrating the tilt of Runeterra's axis and their position on the planet with her hands. "We get redder, darker sunsets when the sun is at this angle."

"That is the science of it," her father agreed. "What does it _mean?"_

"The sun is far from us. It is winter, so the days are short and the nights are long and dark. It is then that the struggle for life is the greatest," she said, quoting exactly from the _Solari Cycles._ "The sun bleeds as it fights its way back to us."

"And it is then that the danger is greatest," her father said somberly. "It is then that we fear the light may be extinguished forever."

She nodded, but this was the first point at which she questioned this teaching. The Solari believed that it was their ceremonies, their worship, that summoned the sun every morning, and drew it back from its long winter sleep. The Rite of Kor on the winter solstice was not needless bloodshed. It was the Solari weapon against the long dark, the Rakkor warriors killed in the Rite a living embodiment of the bleeding labor pains of the sun's re-birth. But to Diana, the sun was like the moon. Its phases were longer, but its return was sure.

"We agreed," her father reminded her, watching her face carefully, "that the instant you differed with the doctrine, we would stop and discuss it."

"Yes, father," she said, with some wariness. Even with her father, who she trusted implicitly, she expected to get the same impatience and irritation her Skaloi had shown her.

"Then explain your logic. Omit nothing." He picked up his quill and waited expectantly.

His instructions to _explain her logic_ and _omit nothing_ were to become two phrases she dreaded above all others.

He wrote down every word as she spoke it in the quick, flowing script of a scholar, then read it back to her to ensure he hadn't missed anything. Then he asked if there was anything she wanted to expand upon or rephrase.

"There will be no misunderstandings between us," he said, in a tone that was more like grim prophecy than aspiration. There was much to add and edit, because the scratching of his quill as she spoke made her obscurely self-conscious. She kept breaking off to circle back to earlier points or jumping forward, but though it was nearly midday by the time she was done explaining herself, she felt in the end that he had guided her to making a better argument than she would have constructed on her own.

And she understood more than ever why Domitian was an Elder of the Fifth Degree. Until then she had never had an opportunity to truly appreciate his intellect, which was prodigious. He questioned her without leading her, prodding her to take her own steps toward her own conclusions. He required that she provide evidence of her assertions and examine the sum of her arguments for inconsistencies and contradiction. Her argument, when they broke for the noon meal, was the best she had ever made.

After lunch, Domitian methodically demolished it.

He cited sources. He showed her the equations which proved the lunar wobble she had observed was nothing less than the wavering of Runeterra itself on its axis, like a child's top that might spin forever or flip onto its side. He taught her the equations that predicted the probability of such a thing. He explained the magic at the heart of Runeterra that was as elusive as a fog, but still had the internal logical consistency of a crystal in its structure, each facet leading inexorably to the next.

In short, he refuted her from every angle, and from angles that she had not dreamed existed. He drew from her every possible objection, every possible counterargument. He refuted himself, countered his own refutation, in a dialogue of such theological perfection that she could only sit in awe as he drew it to its close. It was like watching two champion duelists maneuvering, only this was the product of a single mind. Much of it was simply beyond her comprehension, but she had learned enough in her time as acolyte to appreciate not just the depth of his knowledge, but the elegance with which he assimilated it into his arguments.

Then he let her take Wilhelm for a turn about the cedar grove to stretch her limbs.

"The sleeping sun," her father said when she came back, his quill at the ready. "Explain your logic. Omit nothing."

By the end of the day, her brain felt like a sponge soaked to overflowing and then wrung out to dry and hung up in the sun. She collapsed into bed, barely able to speak for the sheer volume of information she had absorbed. Beside her, Wilhelm curled up on her pillow with a sleepy grumble, his warm little body radiating heat like a brazier. If there was a moon that night, if it shone through her window like a silver beacon, she was too exhausted to notice it.

The next day, she woke up and did it all again.

* * *

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 _Author's Note: Thanks very much for your reviews and notes! I haven't read enough other LoL fanfiction to know if poro-giving is cliched, so I'm sorry if it is, but I couldn't resist._


	7. Chapter 7 Paragon

**Chapter Seven**

 **Paragon**

The bleeding sun was far away and blinded by drifting clouds, but there was blood enough on the ground.

It was the winter solstice, and the air was so cold it burned to breathe it. The wind flung up gusts of snow like great white waves rolling over the open field of the stadium at the _agoge,_ but it wasn't actually snowing. The snow was so fine and frozen that it whirled and gusted along with a breath of wind, and the wind seemed in variable mood today.

Diana felt much the same.

It was thrilling to see the contests, almost fifty pairs of young Rakkor warriors battling to the death, avatars of the bleeding sun. They wore their finest armor, crested and arrayed with the sigil of the Four-Facing Sun, their winter warrior's leathers banded and striped with gold. The snow on the field was crimson with blood, great slashing sweeps and pools of it like some blotted Ionian calligraphy, but the dead warriors were carried swiftly away by the acolytes as soon as they fell. Some had fallen in the first seconds of the Rite. Others were just beginning to wear down, almost three hours later.

It was the Rite of Kor, and these young warriors were sent to aid the bleeding sun in her battle against the darkness. It was beautiful and terrible, the bright flash of spear and shield and sword, the guttural shouts of triumph. The screams of the wounded and dying, the dark spurt of arterial blood.

There was Marathea, leaning on her spear as she knocked away Apheleon with her shield. Apheleon was taller and had the reach on her, but until now he couldn't seem to close. He would soon. Marathea had taken a deep wound on her right thigh and her leathers were soaked with blood. To Diana the swift-pattering droplets were like sands in Shuriman hourglass, trickling away the last moments of her life.

With two years to go until her own Rite, Diana didn't know most of the young warriors on the field well. She had never trained with them, and knew most of them only as passing faces. But Marathea was another that split her time between the _agoge_ and the Temple, and Diana knew her from many hours of mirror-polishing. Merry and always laughing, Marathea was too good-humored to take part in the little scuffles for power and prestige at the Temple, and was well-liked because of it. She and Diana were not friends, had rarely spoken, but there was no ill-will between them.

Now Diana watched her bleeding the last of her life away with the rest of the Solari in attendance. They sat on the wide and snowy stone benches surrounding the field, rising on tiers to accommodate almost the entire village. There seemed some physical evidence of the Solari claim that they were truly children of the sun, for though they wore furs and cloaks, they were still lightly garbed for the bitter cold. Demacians, Noxians, even the magical folk of Zaun and Shurima, they all froze and failed in the cold, losing fingers and toes to the black rot. Not so the Solari. Not so the Rakkor. Like the little goat-dog poros, they seemed to have some internal furnace that kept them warm and vital. Helion, she thought, picking out his spiky bronze hair a few rows below and to the left. Helion often seemed to radiate his own heat, like the summertime sun.

On the field, Marathea staggered and Apheleon had her, his spear stabbing past her shield and into her belly, punching her off her feet and into the snow. She didn't cry out. Her helmet rolled clear and she clutched the spear in her stomach and pulled it out. She flung it aside, then lay still, and died.

"May the light increase," Father murmured beside her, and Diana bowed her head.

She didn't know any of the remaining duelers, four boys and two girls. Usually a long duel ended badly for the girl; even the hardiest of female warriors didn't have the lung capacity or muscle of a man, and couldn't match their stamina. They were taught to rely on speed, on quick, darting attacks that allowed them to score a hit and then retreat, but there wasn't much room to maneuver with nearly a hundred duelers on the field. A woman who couldn't keep moving usually fared badly.

It was one of the boys who died last, and the girl who killed him sank to her knees, bleeding from a dozen places, pulling off her helmet to show a pale face and hair soaked nearly as dark as the earth under the snow with sweat. She was escorted off the field to be stitched, bandaged, and watered by two acolytes, though she had pride enough to shake them away and walk under her own power, too exhausted for triumph.

The last dead boy was carried away by two other acolytes, loaded carefully onto a red litter with a cloth over his eyes, embroidered with the sigil of the many-rayed sun. Those acolytes and Elders that had family on the field were excused from their duties today, but the rest moved hastily to line up the survivors on one end of the field. On the other end, they hastily carried large bundles of firewood, already bound, blessed, and carefully seasoned against this day.

Diana had been given another duty.

She understood that it was to signal the approval of the Temple, and it was a great honor; it was likely that Skala Ligeia had engineered it somehow. For all that Skalos Joras had said she was forgiven, she had been in disgrace since her whipping, and it was natural, inevitable, that it would be so. But two months had come and gone, and they had examined her only a day ago, to see that she was progressing under Domitian's demanding tutelage.

They had not found her wanting.

So today, at one of the highest and holiest rites of the Solari, she was the _psalta._

Dressed in white and silver, she looked paler than ever among all the ruddy Solari. Her cloak was of winter fox fur, her boots laced in white thongs over her winter leathers. Her hair was braided with silver ribbons and hung nearly to her waist, thick and gleaming silver-blonde. She stood on her bench beside Father, a tall girl and still coltish with it, and her voice when she sang was as high and clear and sweet as anyone could have asked.

 _Ask not the sun why she fades_

 _Why the light to dark gives way_

 _Ask not why life to death must yield_

 _As sunset comes, as twilight fades._

Her voice rose like bells, soft and mournful, swelling to roll and fill the whole of the stadium. It was a song of grief, grief for the loss of the sun over the long winter, grief for the young Rakkor whose blood dyed the snow red. She was the voice of the Solari during the time when their dead sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, were laid out and the firewood was piled high by the acolytes. Her song was the anguish of their broken hearts.

 _How bright he was, our Rakkor son_

 _What strength she had, our warrior maid_

 _They are gone like wind upon the grass_

 _Their battle done, their banners laid._

It rolled up in the white exhalation of her breath, as if the song itself were made solid by the cold and cast into the teeth of the bitter wind. Diana thought of Marathea, and her throat tightened. In the back of her mind it wasn't Marathea's cold face, white and stilled forever as she lay dead; it was Lelia, Kallista, Partha, Borean, and all the others she knew. And oh, what if it were Helion? What if it were him, dead on the field? Yet all around her, the Rakkor faces as far as she could see were iron. They would grieve in their hearts, they would grieve in the darkness, but only the _psalta_ Diana could grieve for them under the open sky.

 _They are vassals ever faithful,_

 _Summoned to her call_

 _Sped westward to the bleeding sun_

 _With spear and shield, her wall._

Now the Elders and the acolytes were carrying the dead to the firewood, the bodies wrapped in white cloths. It took three, sometimes even four men, to carry them; the dead would be burned with their armor and weapons, so they could go instantly to battle. And maybe it made it easier to see all those dead, laid side by side, brothers and sisters in death as they were in life. They did not die alone. And those left behind did not grieve alone.

 _We will not fear the shadowed dark_

 _We are not wayward souls to roam_

 _For they went ahead with courageous hearts_

 _And by their hands, they bring us home._

How could you fear death, Father had asked her, if you knew your brothers and sisters awaited you? She knew she was thinking of his own brothers and sisters, men and women he hadn't seen in more than fifty years, but still he had trained with them, bled with them. Did they live still? If they did, they would be old and scarred, like the tough old roots of great trees.

There were mosaics in the Temple that showed the spirits of the young dead of the Rite of Kor glowing from the heart of the sun, their faces outlined in fire, their arms outstretched, beckoning the adult Rakkor left on earth to join them. The Rite of Kor sent the sun the warriors she needed to fight back the dark, but it also strengthened the hearts of the Rakkor left behind, Father explained; a Rakkor warrior never feared death. And now, thought Diana, Marathea would be there. For a long moment, she looked at the wide and bloody stretch of the field. It was as much to allow herself time to recover as to let the acolytes lay the last body on the pyre. There was no delay, from death to burning. It would be cruel, the Elders said; cruel to women like Kallista's mother, the ferocious Elder Jocaste.

Kallista's older sister had fallen today, and while Elder Jocaste's face was iron, it was old iron, gray and brittle.

The torches were touched to the wood of the pyre and Diana lifted her voice one last time. All of them sang with her, filling the bowl of the stadium with sound that rose up and rolled and swelled to the sky as the white cloth began to catch, and the first of the dead began to burn.

 _Oh sun, bring the end_

 _Let this darkness never come again._

* * *

On the way home from the Rite, Diana asked again.

"When is my tutor coming, Father?"

And he said the same thing he had said for the last two months.

"Soon."

It made her angry, but anger served no purpose; Father merely stared at her until she was ready to calm down and discuss whatever it was rationally. She pulled her furs tighter around her shoulders.

"Because my Rite is two years away now," she said doggedly. "I'm already two months behind everyone else. I don't want to…"

And then she trailed off when she realized what she was about to say. She didn't want to go into the sun, and preserve the life of this world? She didn't want to go with her brothers and sisters to this last and greatest battle?

"You will not," Father said, watching the evolutions of her face carefully. Before him she felt transparent as glass. And that assurance—and the uncertainty of what Father thought about what she was thinking—was all she would have. In as much as she was instructed to tell him every part of what she was thinking, Diana thought, aggrieved, why did Father _never_ have to tell _her?_

In the courtyard she practiced again with glaive and spear, sword and shield, shadow fencing. In the bitter cold of the morning before sunrise she left her warm bed, donned her armor, and ran the paths that strung along the outer cliffs, mile upon mile while the cold froze her face and her breath puffed white. Father interspersed her lessons with exercise, giving her an hour here, two hours there, filling her daylight hours with work and instruction, taxing her mind and body. He had a boy from the lower village come to do her marketing so she wouldn't be bothered leaving the Temple Heights.

Diana wouldn't have minded being bothered. She would have leaped at the chance to get out of the house. The days wore away and winter passed, and still she learned and trained, making her round from home to cliffs to Temple and back again.

Maybe because Father couldn't go anywhere except the Temple and home, he forgot that _she_ could. Or maybe it was part of her punishment. She did feel often that she was being punished in some obscure way; she felt that there was something in Father always held back, listening to everything she said and judging her. Sometimes it was physically uncomfortable to sit in his room and attempt to explain her logic, because Father seemed to think so much more than he said aloud. It was less like an argument than a…a… _confession._

It had taken many days to grope for that word in her thoughts, and much of her wanted to shy away from it, but it was true. Until Skalos Abeon, Diana had trusted her teachers and Elders implicitly, but now she turned the mistrust she had learned from that man onto even her father. It would have helped had he spoken, explained himself, but there was a wall between them that had been there since the whipping. The scratching of his quill as she spoke in their lessons had taken on a sinister aspect, and she often wanted to snatch the parchment away and read what he had written. Somehow, she didn't know quite why, she suspected even her beloved father of deceiving her.

The agony of that thought added strength to her arm and she slit open the practice dummy from navel to throat. Sand spilled onto the floor of the courtyard and she stepped back, panting for breath. She would sweep away the mess at the end of her practice, but for now she switched back to her spear, tossing her sword onto the nearby bench. She wanted to practice with her glaive, but she knew she couldn't favor that weapon; the spear, then the sword, were the preferred weapons with the Rakkor, especially since it was hard to use a glaive with a shield. It was a heavy weapon, heavier in the blade, heavier in the shaft, best used with a two-handed grip. In battle they might use a glaive against heavy cavalry, but until then, it was spear and shield, with swords for mop-up and close quarters.

She worked herself hard, sweating in the cold air, the multiple light layers of her training garb wicking the moisture away and keeping her warm. The Rakkor wore training leathers when the weather was cold, leather leggings and tunic fitted tightly to the skin and lined with cotton or linen. She would wear through many pairs and outgrow the rest over the years until she settled into her adult height and weight. For women, it was around age twenty, and then she would go to the leatherworker for a final measurement to commission real warrior's leathers, reinforced with metal wire and plate, to be worn under her armor when it was too cold to go in her tunic and sandals alone.

With her spear she practiced the _thuella,_ the tempest, a slashing move performed with her arm straight along the shaft of the spear, an overhand arc that swung upward and slashed down, intended to cleave an enemy from shoulder to hip. She liked the maneuver; it reminded her of Skalos Grakos calling her a whirlwind. Slash and pace, forward, forward, driving back imaginary enemies, and then she spun counterface, her shield smashing one way as her spear stabbed forward, an attack on an enemy approaching from behind.

Her spear smashed into a shield and almost skidded out of her hand, and she staggered back a pace, her shield snapping up automatically.

The monster in front of her was surely more metal than man.

She only had time for one awed impression of height, shoulders as wide as the turrets of Mogron Pass, the high horsetail crest of his helmet dyed crimson, and then his massive shield swung forward like the blunt end of a battering ram and she dodged, lunging for the clear part of the courtyard. His sword swung down behind her and struck sparks off the paving stones.

"Who are you?" she demanded, and swung her shield out to meet him, deflecting. It was like slamming her shield into a rock face. She bounced backward and narrowly managed to keep her feet.

"Your teacher." He advanced on her and his voice, at least, was reassuringly human. "If I choose. I will not teach a coward."

"I am no coward." His sword stabbed out and she dodged again. "I'm not stupid, either."

"Words are wind," he said, and charged her, his armor rattling like the thunder.

She slipped him again, stabbed out with her spear, and she was genuinely trying to kill him; half measures would be useless with this man. For such a big man, he was surprisingly quick. He was wearing full Rakkor armor, breast and back plate, helmet, shin greaves, gauntlets, and he had at least eighteen inches and two hundred pounds on Diana, but he was still swift as a striking snake. It wasn't even a contest. His sword caught her shield and shoved it aside, and he pulled the sharp tip of it an inch from her belly.

"Again," he said, stepping back three paces and tossing his sword aside in favor of a spear. Diana didn't even have time to contemplate where exactly she was going to stab him before he smashed his shield into her and knocked her flat on her back.

She got up, readied her shield, and decided aim for his throat this time.

He knocked her down again. And again. Over the course of the next two hours she was stabbed, slashed, bludgeoned twice with the butt of his spear, and once knocked out cold, but that was her own fault. She'd charged into him while he'd been swinging his shield and the full weight of it had come down on her head with the force of a mountain boulder.

She was dizzy.

There was no part of her that didn't hurt.

There were multiple parts of her that would need stitching.

But she had scored a hit on him.

Across one of his enormous biceps was a gash four inches long, gouged deep into the meat of the muscle. It wasn't enough to cripple him, but he would feel it every time he swung his sword or hefted his spear.

"Enough," he said, stopping her charge one-handed. When he took off his helmet, he was older than she expected; forty at least, though not a whit less powerful for it. His face was broad and tanned and plain, a bit the worse for what looked like many broken noses, and his eyes were a searing Rakkor blue, his hair the red-gold of molten copper.

"You're the tutor my father sent for," she said, more statement than question.

"I am." He looked at her without favor. "You're the moon-addled acolyte of the Temple of the Sun."

She bared her teeth at him. "I am."

"I am charged with keeping you alive," he said. "Your task is to see that you deserve it. That is the bargain between us. Are we agreed?"

"Yes," she said, and gripped his forearm as he extended it to seal the deal. His forearm was the size of a joint of ham.

"Good. I will see your father now." He let her go and picked up his spear and shield, strapping the latter to his enormous back. "There is already a chirurgeon in your room. I told her you would need stitching, after. When she is done you will run again, a full circuit from here to the Spear and back again. Then you may come and see us."

That was nearly ten miles.

"Who _are_ you?" she demanded again, trailing after him into the house. He moved through it as easily as if he lived there, and that more than anything else nettled her.

"I am Karacas," he said, and went into her father's study.

* * *

The way Karacas, the Paragon of the Rakkor, had come to be her teacher was this.

Nearly fifty years before, two young Rakkor warriors named Domitian and Erebos decided to climb their own version of the Titan's Spear. Near the village of Leros there was a high promontory they called the Ram's Head for the slight bowing at the crest, like a ram's head between its horns. There was a steep slope on the back of the Ram's Head that was an unpleasant run but not dangerous in the least, but it wasn't for that that the Ram was renowned among the aspiring young heroes of Leros. The eastern face of the Ram's Head was so sharp it looked as if a sword had sheared that side off, and year after year, they challenged one another to climb it.

Now a third young warrior, Hesperus, and Domitian were like rams themselves, and had been butting heads since Hesperus had tried to forcibly take Domitian's practice shield from him at the _agoge_ when they were both six years old _._ And though Hesperus was the larger of the two and would be all his life, Domitian was cunning, and generally got the better of their exchanges.

There was one memorable night that he did not.

It was the night after the Rite of Kor, and Domitian and his friend Erebos were deep in their cups at an inn in Leros. It was customary to salute their dead brothers and sisters after the Rite, and Domitian and his friend had decided that one cup for each brother or sister they lost was the only way to honor them properly. They had so honored roughly a dozen of their fallen comrades before Hesperus found them.

The result of the exchange was that Domitian and Erebos found themselves outside marching toward the Ram's Head and sobering up quickly in the cold. It was the night of the solstice, the longest night of the year, and the wind was blasting the mountainside like a forge bellows, throwing up clouds of ice and snow. But Hesperus had goaded them into the challenge, Domitian wouldn't give his rival the satisfaction of backing down, and Erebos wasn't about to let his friend make the icy climb alone. So, stone-cold sober except for a lingering nausea, they began the ascent.

It was the longest climb they had ever made. With only the moon's light to see by, they found their hand and footholds by looking for the shine of ice on the narrow ledges, and then trusted that their hands would melt the ice before they slipped and fell twenty, fifty, a hundred feet. From the base of the cliff to the top of the Ram's Head was nearly three hundred feet; on a clear day, a climber who had the nerves of a Bilgewater pickpocket and the sinews of Avarosan ice-boar might manage it, if the wind didn't rip them bodily off the cliff face.

But after nearly forty minutes in the grim dark, they began to think that it might be possible. Or at least that they were luckier than any young Rakkor could ever dream of being. They would be _legends_ if they pulled it off, they told each other, climbing, endlessly climbing. They would be remembered for a hundred years if they managed to climb the Ram's Head in the dark, in the cold, in this wind, while at least partly drunk.

Of course, that wasn't what happened.

There was no warning; not even time to shout. His toehold was crusted with solid ice and it was impossible to tell where the ice ended and the rock began. And maybe Domitian wasn't as steady as he should have been, or he set his foot wrong. The ice gave way with a sickening lurch and then he was falling, falling in the dark with the wind whistling by his ears and Erebos's trailing shout lost above him.

The pain when he landed was shocking, explosive, all-encompassing. It was the fear of that pain that made him dream of falling, decades after the accident. But he lived to dream those dreams, which was more important in the end.

After Domitian's accident and removal to the Solari Erebos never forgot him, and more than once made a pilgrimage to the Temple of the Sun to visit his friend. Some thirty years before, he made the pilgrimage with his ten year-old son, Karacas, whose name meant "breaker of stones." Even at ten the boy looked more than capable of shattering them with his bare hands.

"And Karacas usually stays with Father when he comes to the Temple," Diana concluded, a story that she had pieced together from a dozen different sources over the past few weeks. Maybe all the long lonely months had been worth it to have Karacas, the Paragon of the Rakkor, to teach her. Helion looked overjoyed; Kallista torn between laughter and annoyance. Lelia, a white patch over her missing eye, was as fixated on Wilhelm as ever, and was dangling a poro snack on a string for him to chase.

They were clustered around the sandstone hearth at the front of the house, where they could be noisy without disturbing Father or Karacas, who, Diana thought privately, was as touchy as an old woman about his naptime. It was pleasantly warm with the fire going, and Father had even let her serve honey-cakes like she was a grown-up lady entertaining for the afternoon, the thick sweet pastry neatly quartered and warming by the hearth. She wasn't sure how she felt about being a grown-up lady, as opposed to a grown-up warrior, but she was entirely sure about how she felt about honey cakes.

"I suppose if you can't train at the _agoge,_ that's some compensation," Kallista said dryly, while Helion laughed and kissed the side of Diana's head with a hearty smack.

"If you got lost in Shurima you'd come back with the lost treasure of Bel'zhun," He said gleefully. "Can we see him? I want to ask about the siege of the Hoplodome."

"His duel with Kirith the Technomancer, the Darkhallow champion," Kallista added, beginning to smile at the idea. "There has to be more to _that_ story."

"The march to Kumungu," Lelia said, her eye flicking hopefully to Diana. Lelia had always loved stories about faraway lands and exotic creatures. And if Wilhelm was a representative sample, the feeling was mutual; the poro devoured the dangling snack in a single bite and then bounded into Lelia's lap to lick her face.

Diana had been about to demur on the grounds that Karacas would pound her flat for asking, but she could deny Lelia nothing.

"I'll see," she said instead.

"They say he's the best spearman in a hundred years, you have to show me what he teaches you," Kallista said. "Or see if I can come and train with you? Just once?"

Though she had only known Karacas for a few weeks, Diana could already picture her teacher's reaction to that suggestion. His expressionless face somehow managed to convey a wide range of emotions, all the way from irritation to annoyance to exasperation. The idea of training all the yapping wolf cubs of the Solari, as he would say, might just move him from exasperation to apoplexy.

"Maybe if I tell him I need to spar against people closer to my size sometimes," she said aloud, winding the argument through her mind.

"You do," Kallista agreed immediately. "Is he as tall as they say? Karacas?"

"He has to duck to get in the house and Father had to have a special cot made for him so his feet won't dangle off the end."

All of them looked suitably impressed.

"Then you _definitely_ need some shorter to spar against sometimes," Kallista said, nodding her head as if there were nothing else for it; it was as inescapable as sunset. "Training to fight against someone like Karacas is completely different than fighting someone…"

"Your size?" Lelia asked slyly, her dimple flickering in her left cheek.

"Or some middling height between you and Karacas," Helion said, puffing out his chest. "It's like Skalos Grakos says, we have to train for all possibilities."

It was a good argument. They put their heads together to refine it further and time flew by, the first hours Diana had spent with her friends in nearly a month. Her father never let her forget that she was a danger to them as much as herself; even when he didn't say it, she could see it in his eyes every time she asked to see them again.

She hadn't told Lelia and Kallista why she was so confined yet, but she did wonder sometimes if they guessed it. Helion wouldn't have told them; he had urged Diana to do so too many times to take the task on himself, and for all his gregarious nature, he knew well enough how to keep his mouth shut when he had to. But something in Kallista's manner had given her away, a new hesitance when she spoke as if she were weighing the words first for any accidental references to Diana's misfortune. She might have figured it out herself, but Diana was almost sure her mother, the formidable Elder Jocaste, had told her.

Lelia, Diana thought, had put the pieces together on her own, and was just waiting for Diana to bring it up herself.

Well, it wouldn't be today.

"If your father wanted you to train with the _agoge,_ he wouldn't have invited me," another voice said, interrupting their planning. Kallista actually gasped aloud and all four of them turned to goggle at Karacas, who was in full, impressive armor with his helmet tucked under one beefy arm.

"Oh," Diana said, after a painful silence. "Skalos, this is…"

"I heard." He turned a gimlet eye on the other three wolf cubs, who had the grace to look at their hands, their feet, and the floor. "They have business elsewhere, I hope. You were to meet me fifteen minutes ago. In the grove. In your armor."

"We'll go," Helion said, low, giving Diana a quick kiss and scooping up Wilhelm to give the poro's head a rub goodbye. Karacas was already stalking away around the side of the house, but his voice rose up behind, clear and unmistakable.

"Tell the tall girl to come back in two week's time," he called. "You need someone else to spar against, or so I've heard."

Helion looked thunderstruck. Lelia clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter.

Kallista, who had inherited every measure of her mother's dignity, actually bounced in her seat.

* * *

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 _Author's Note: It being Christmas, I make no promises for a speedy next chapter, but don't worry, it'll get here. Thanks again for your reviews and messages, I really appreciate every one of them._


	8. Chapter 8 Faint is the Light

**Chapter Eight**

 **Faint is the Light that is Purest**

Karacas called them all back in turn over the weeks that followed, alternating Kallista and Helion most often because Diana found, to her humiliation, that she was worse than useless against Lelia.

"Should I take one of your eyes, so we're even?" Lelia demanded contemptuously at the end of one particularly pitiful bout, throwing down her sword and stalking away. When Karacas brought her back three weeks later, it was with the cool comment that Diana would either find her guts or Lelia would personally show them to her. And one-eyed or not, Lelia fought with a new ferocity that made Diana retaliate out of sheer self-preservation.

She fought better against Kallista, and better still with her against Karacas. At the end of their bout, the two girls stripped off their helmets and staggered together toward a low rock wall at the west side of the cedar grove. Diana leaned back on her elbows, panting, while Kallista sprawled beside her in the grass, her long arms and legs making her look like a stick insect that had been trodden upon.

"You'd expect him to be more heroic," she observed, watching the enormous shape of Karacas striding toward the house for his midday meal.

"He just beat both of us into the dust, that seems heroic enough to me." Diana rolled her right shoulder, which Karacas had repeatedly smacked with the flat of his blade.

"I mean, the things he says. He's just like Skalos Grakos but with less yelling."

"Did you expect a Wuju Master?" The idea tickled Diana. "The blind grasshopper can still leap great distances, that kind of thing?"

Kallista snorted. "Well, yes, actually."

"He doesn't like to talk." Diana closed her eyes, feeling the cool wind slipping through her hot, sweat-soaked hair. It would be summer soon; she could smell it in the air, warm, green, growing things. "He just goes to the Temple all the time."

"Why?" Kallista asked, and Diana shrugged.

"I've seen him in the wind gardens a few times when I was working, but I don't know what else he does."

"Why do _you_ go the Temple?" Kallista asked curiously. "You're studying with your father, you don't need to be an acolyte."

Diana had sometimes wondered the same. Much of her time at the Temple was sheer drudgery; dusting, sweeping, cleaning long miles of marble floor, polishing mirrors, tending the dreamlike forms of the trees in the wind gardens. Once she had even been sent with some of the other acolytes to polish the enormous four-facing sun on the very peak of the great dome of the Temple, its arching rays gleaming where the sun struck them in a thousand mirrored facets.

It was the thought of those facets that provided the answer.

"Everything about the Temple is about the light," she said thoughtfully. "The mirrors, the water, it's meant to catch the light and cast it back out again, stronger. That's what Father says a true Temple is meant to do for your faith."

"That's what Mother says, too," Kallista said, her cheeks turning a little pink. Matters of faith were seldom discussed among the wolf cubs, but it suddenly struck Diana that Kallista was the one friend who would understand as none of the others did: the daughter of an Elder. "She says it's how you can tell the truth of the Solari, when you look at the catacombs of Noxus or the old hallows of the Demacian gods. They put up _their_ statues for fashion."

There was just enough scorn in that last word to embolden Diana to press a little further.

"Do you study with your mother?"

"Yes. She's of the Didact school, you know, so it's mostly recitation and interpretation." Idly Kallista lifted a blade of grass and blew it away, carried swiftly by the wind. "She calls it winnowing the words, separating the grain from the chaff until you can find the truth of them."

"That's what Skalos Kephalos taught when I was at the Temple," Diana remarked, and then an awkward silence fell, the truth of why she was no longer a student there dangling between them as if it had been tricked out in gilt and hung on a gaudy tavern sign.

It was Kallista who nerved herself first.

"Why don't you anymore? Is it true that you're…they say that you're…"

"Moon-addled?"

"Yes."

Neither girl looked at the other, and Diana was suddenly conscious that her shoulder was brushing Kallista's from her place on the grass, that the long, dusty copper of Kallista's braid was coiling alongside her own pale plait.

"I am," she said finally, and it came out more flat and challenging than she'd intended. "I always have been."

Of all her friends, she had dreaded this conversation with Kallista the most. Domitian had said more than once that there was no one more hidebound or conventional than a Didact; parsers of someone else's words, he said, and it was no compliment. To a theorist like Domitian, they were good for beating the required verses and canon into the thick skulls of acolytes, but little more. The canon was very clear on the subject of the lures and lies of the moon, and worse, the deceits of blasphemers.

But Kallista was silent for a moment, and then recited,

 _Beware the path that is surest_

 _For what is easy oft leads you astray,_

 _For faint is the light that is purest_

 _With faith it will show you the way._

"It's from a clay in the Archives," she explained, ignoring Diana when the other girl flipped over to goggle at her. "Mother showed it to me once; she thinks it was used to teach children long, long ago. It sounds like a child's verse, doesn't it? But we used to teach it. Didacts _remember,"_ Kallista added, in answer to the unflattering look of shock on Diana's face. The humorous curl of her upper lip told Diana that she knew the general opinion regarding the Didact school perfectly well.

"But the straight path," Diana stuttered, thinking of the countless verses talking about the sure way, the bright way.

"But not the easy way," Kallista said, lifting one tawny shoulder in a shrug. "Maybe it is easy for some, but not for Mother. She told me," she said a little defiantly, "what happened to you. I knew something was wrong and you wouldn't tell me. Mother thinks they were wrong to whip you for what you said. She said perhaps a little more blasphemy would sharpen the wits of the faithful, and I think so, too. That's why I came when they whipped you. Even if Helion hadn't asked me, I would have come."

"Thank you." It was hard to get the words out around the lump in her throat. All these months later, and the humiliation still burned her when she thought about it. The pain of the whipping was nothing compared to the look in her father's eyes, the stout, disappointed loyalty of Helion. She knew they both had pitied her, been disappointed in her, had been _shamed_ by her. Even now it made her cringe, remembering it.

But Kallista had been there too. And Kallista had stood by her because she believed in Diana, and believed that _Diana_ was being wronged.

"Mother almost sent me to the Temple too, instead of the _agoge,"_ Kallista was continuing, giving her friend time to gather herself. "But my father said no; he would give one to the Temple, but the other would go to the warriors." That was as close as Kallista would come to mentioning her sister, dead only three months before in the Rite. "Mother is glad now that she sent me to the _agoge._ I don't see how the Temple would have taught me the faith any better than she has anyway. _"_

"And now you have Karacas teaching you too," Diana said, nudging Kallista's shoulder to push the shadow from her eyes. "Tall girl."

Kallista smirked. "How long do you think til he learns my name?"

"At least as long as it takes him to learn mine." Diana rolled stiffly to her feet, offering a hand to pull Kallista up with her. Karacas, when he had to refer to Diana at all, tended to call her _crazy girl._ Lelia was _blonde girl._ She sometimes idly wondered what descriptor he would apply to Helion, who was currently just _boy_ , and plainly resented the slight on his manhood. Tall boy? Redhead boy? Sulky boy?

A shout from Karacas sent Kallista scurrying home shortly after, stopping only long enough to press Diana's hand with hers, a final gesture of solidarity that Diana carried with her in the lonely days that followed. There was some unspoken agreement between Karacas and her father that more time training with her friends meant less time with them otherwise, as if too much exposure might taint them with her sickness. Perhaps it was true. Even Helion had been turned away, only permitted to visit once a week for dinner, and every third week for practice.

So, battered though she was by Karacas, Diana had begun sneaking out when she could, rare stolen nights that she treasured more than anything else in her life. And while Helion had a deep and abiding respect for Domitian as well as a healthy fear of the powerful Elder, neither fear or respect were quite up to the challenge of teenage hormones.

They met most often in the grove of cedars, Diana speeding soundlessly down the path with Wilhelm bounding at her heels. The poro went straight to Domitian and started howling whenever she left him behind otherwise. In the starry dark Helion would be waiting for her on the bench, but rose with his arms outstretched to catch her when she flew into them. He had become a _very_ good kisser.

"I missed you," he whispered, as if it had been months since they last met.

"I missed _you,"_ Diana whispered back, and once he had kissed her breathless, they sat down together wherever it was warmest and he told her all that had happened at the _agoge,_ so it was almost as if she had been there. She told him sometimes about Karacas, who was a walking story, but while her father dominated her waking and sleeping hours, there never seemed to be anything to say about him.

Wilhelm curled up in her lap and their hands met again and again as they petted the poro. He was getting pudgy, though Diana hadn't the least idea who was feeding him. The kitchen maids denied it every time she accused them.

Those nights were too short. Sometimes it seemed she just blinked and the sky was lightening to the east, and she realized the whole night had gone again.

"Remember what you were saying," she would say, exchanging final kisses with Helion that were no less eager than their first. "Next time we'll finish the conversation."

"I love you," he told her, and kissed her again, then tore himself away, going straight from her to the _agoge._ Diana herself went back to her room to dress and make the long run to the Spear.

Those nights were few, too few, but she hugged them to her like the night, like the stars, like the moon.

* * *

"The diminishing angles of the winter sun." Father, sitting in his chair behind his desk, looked at her expectantly. "Explain your logic. Omit nothing."

The refracted spectrum.

The diffusion of light as measured by the concavity of a mirror.

The radial angles of the mirrors for the Salutation ceremony.

Explain your logic.

The effect of Runeterran magic upon the gravitational force of the sun.

The effect of same upon the moon.

Omit nothing.

Omit nothing.

Omit nothing.

It was like being squeezed slowly under a boulder. Every protestation, every contradiction, every errant thought she had was wrung out, examined, cross-examined, and dismissed. At the door, Wilhelm scratched and snuffled anxiously, then settled down to pant as the minutes and hours and days went by. Her chair had no back and her spine got stiff, the back of her neck began to ache, and still Father's quill scratched on.

It was much the same as her training under Karacas. He could have battered her down with his sheer size, but instead he outmaneuvered her, he crowded her, he drove her back until there was no choice but to lash out with the tricks he had taught her. He drilled her until it was muscle memory, her shield and spear snapping out in flawless form. Diana _dreamed_ of practicing in the grove, in the courtyard, sometimes on the windy clifftop past the Two-Faced Stone. And when she dreamed, more often than not, she could hear Father's voice like the wind saying _explain your logic. Omit nothing._

She could understand how both her teachers were going about their instruction. Karacas built a foundation of strength and reflex so she wouldn't even need to think about how to move, whether her foot should be placed so and her weight distributed thus. She slipped into her positions as easily as breathing. And when she erred, a quick swipe with the butt of his spear into her helmeted head usually set her right. If she felt like a child, copying him with all the credibility of a little girl with a willow switch, at least she was a strong and graceful child who knew where to put her feet.

With her father, it felt less like building a foundation than building the walls of a prison.

A geometrically perfect, inescapable prison. She helped build it herself, every stone another argument in which she had omitted nothing. Father's logic was unassailable. The equations and magic he taught her were far beyond anything she could have imagined, and in such perfect balance that it actually took her breath away when she understood, the pieces of the puzzle falling together with an almost audible click.

"Science is sorcery," Father said. "Or so they believe in Zaun. Some say they are synonyms for each other, different explanations for the same phenomena."

"Did you ever go to Zaun?" she asked, surprised.

"No." Father let that lie there for a moment, as if he were deciding whether or not to explain further. "We do not permit outsiders to come to the temple, but we do correspond with other scholars. This," he said, poking a narrow book with the tip of his quill. "This one is from Corbin Stanwick, in Zaun. There are others from Piltover, the Royal Academy in Demacia, and a few from Shurima."

"Do they all study the sun as we do?"

"No. Tinkerers and magicians, most of them. Only in Shurima do they contemplate the heavens."

"What do they say about them?" She asked, feeling some inexplicable hope well inside her. But Father, as ever, seemed to read her thoughts.

"All they have is sand, and the past," he said, and looked at her with piercing blue eyes. "Would you want to know what they say of the sun and the moon?"

"Yes," she said, a little defiantly. He would know if she lied. "Isn't all knowledge worth something?"

"We believe only what we can prove," he said, with finality, and picked up his quill.

It was the evil in her that made her wonder. The suffocating, panicking claustrophobia she felt in Father's study was the moon-sickness, and she had to purge herself of it. Like Karacas, Father drilled her, making her repeat the principal, the rebuttal, the conclusion. It was a mental reflex no less than the physical reflexes she was honing. She learned to argue as Father did, with structure, clarity, and irresistible, dispassionate reason.

If it hadn't been for Helion, she would have been deeply, desperately unhappy.

Maybe her love for Helion was amplified because the love of her father was denied her, like the invisible sun on the winter solstice, caught by the mirrors but invisible to the naked eye. Diana herself never thought it through in those terms, but she felt it, as much as she felt denied the light on the nights of the full moon, locked lonely in the cellar. Some part of her argued that Father _did_ love her, of course he did, but there was another voice in her that whispered how she had shamed him, that now he was only attempting to undo the damage she had done to him in the Temple. And he wasn't her _real_ father.

She tried to argue those thoughts down, presenting evidence and counter-evidence, but since the day of her whipping all those months before, there had been little evidence, to Diana's mind, to present for the argument that Father still loved her.

"Father," she said as he locked her in the cellar on the night of the full moon, catching him as he was turning away. She always seemed to be stopping him as he left the room. "Father, is everything…is everything all right?"

"Yes," he said, lifting his candle to look through the barred window of the cellar door at her. There were heavy bags under his eyes.

"I was wondering if we could have breakfast together tomorrow," she said awkwardly, and felt stupid for saying it. She had never asked before, but she had never needed to.

"I promised Karacas that I would not interfere with your training," Father replied, turning away to the steps. "Go and sing your sleep-songs, Diana."

She watched the light vanish up the stairs, clutching the narrow bars in her hands as if she would push them apart and squirm through the tiny window. She didn't want to sing. She wanted _out._ She wanted to go after Father and shake him until he went back the way he had been before.

But if he had changed, whose fault was it?

Barefoot, she knelt in front of her altar, carefully pulling her long hair back from her face as she lit the small white candles. Her hair was long now, nearly to her waist, and she shook it free. She rarely let it loose, and it was her one point of vanity: fine as silk and gleaming silver-blonde, shining in the candle light. When she became a warrior and joined the Rakkor army, she would have to cut it.

Diana could see it in her mind as clearly as if it were a vision in the candle flames. She and Helion and Kallista and Lelia in the army, the battles they would fight, the places they would go. The Rakkor army most often fought in the wars between Demacia and Noxus, but those battles were everywhere, from the jungles of Kumungu to even the shores of Bilgewater. Noxus had ambitions of empire, and though Demacia would never explicitly state it, so did they; better the protection of a benign Demacian hegemony, they would say, than the filthy tyranny of Noxus.

Well, the Rakkor bent the knee to no one.

Helion wanted to sail to the Shadow Isles, but for Diana, it was Ionia. The stories she heard made it sound like a garden, and she wanted to inhale its strange spices and see the Plum Blossom Festival with its thousand points of light. And she could; she had no false modesty about her abilities. She and Helion could go anywhere they wanted, be anything they desired.

Except for the nagging certainty that there was something _else._ Something she couldn't explain, and certainly couldn't argue. Father had left her with no arguments. There was only the inexplicable surety in her blood that there was something beyond the beautiful and perfectly balanced Solari faith. Something else. Something _more._

It was a choice, she thought, bowing her head, her forehead pressed against the cold golden heart of the Four Faced Sun on the altar. Helion, the army, and the world, or the questions that seemed to have been built into her bones.

* * *

His human girl was finally asleep.

He waited another few minutes to make sure, his little hooves clipping dully on the stone floor as he cautiously nudged her, then waited for her slow, even breaths. On the nights they spent in the underground place, he had learned it was best to let her be while she knelt, glowing in the candlelight.

Wilhelm didn't like those nights. Even now his horns were low on his head from the weariness and unhappiness that radiated from his girl, that radiated from his home. But she was asleep now, so the fuzzy little beast clipped toward the locked door at the cellar entrance and then stood a moment, listening. The house was silent, the servants gone, but far away he could hear faint stirrings of life: the scratch of quill on parchment and the slow breathing of an old man.

In a blink, the poro was on the other side of the door and bouncing up the steps without any real effort or even realization of what he had done. He wanted to go see the man upstairs, and poro magic was rooted in their own simple, fuzzy-minded desires.

Passing down a long hallway, Wilhelm moved through two more doors as if they weren't there, trotting through the old man's bedchamber and study. On the nights when the moon was full, the old man slept as poorly as his girl did, and Wilhelm had learned to correlate the two. He could feel the pull of the moon as if he were water, as if he were waves, though a poro had no words for gravity and no idea at all of science. He just knew that when that pull was strongest, the girl went down to the dark place, and then the whole house was in shadow in Wilhelm's heart.

Wilhelm tapped one hoof on the last doorway, and with the absentmindedness of long habit, the old man let him in and went back to his work, his long robe sweeping the floor ahead of the bounding poro. Wilhelm could feel the man's pain in his twisted gait, the way his strong leg ached and his lower back twisted with the effort of limping all day on his staff. When the man sat in his chair, Wilhelm leaped instantly into his lap and curled up close, a silky-soft bundle of warmth to be pet. And in so doing, he felt some tiny measure of unhappiness depart the old man, just from the simple comfort of a loving presence.

Among poros, this was considered the greatest of their magics. Everyone knew shadows collected like cobwebs in unhappy places, and left to spin, the place would slowly strangle on them. Dispelling that darkness was a mighty magic.

This room was a smaller one behind the main study, closed and windowless, just a desk, chair, and shelves laden with scrolls, books, and candles. Wax streaked and dripped and ran in runnels, but the man was archivist enough that not a drop touched any of his papers. It smelled of beeswax, ink, and dust; no one else was ever permitted in this room, and the man rarely had time to tidy it himself.

Wilhelm chewed on the man's beard absently, his dark, limpid eyes scanning the room. To a poro, color was less important than magic, life, and potential. Most things in this room were useful, and the desk and shelves gave off a faint silvery utility-light to show they were wanted and in use. The scrolls and books on the shelves glowed brighter, some of them almost blinding, and brightest of all was the book the man was writing in. Wilhelm had tried more than once to get at that one, and even now positively itched for it. He had chewed through more than one of the books and had once worked his way through half of a scroll cubby before the man caught him. Useful things, especially magical useful things, were irresistible to a poro, and the potential-lines wound around the man's book made it glow like a star.

The man muttered as he worked, sometimes to Wilhelm, sometimes to himself as he paged through his books and rattling papers, writing, always writing. Sometimes his voice was tinged with excitement, sometimes with anger, and sometimes even with fear. Sometimes he would stop abruptly and stand, stumping brusquely from the tiny secret study to kneel at the candle-place in his bedroom, and press his seamed forehead to the golden metal sun there. His breath came fast and his old heart raced, and he would whisper in the dark, _may the light increase,_ lighting his candles and waving their glow toward his face. Some nights he never went back to the little book-room at all, painfully pacing the floor until dawn.

Sometimes, without knowing it, the old man spoke magic from the papers and scrolls, ancient words that made the very air glow with potential thick enough to chew on.

It was a dark, cold magic.

Even Wilhelm, a creature of the bitter Frejlord, shivered when he felt it. There was a perceptible shift when those words were spoken, a sudden, dark pull on the world that was like dead hands clawing their way up through the earth. They were dangerous words. The man was right to be afraid.

The man shouldn't say those words. He should be feeding Wilhelm treats.

On a tray in the room was a endless supply of poro snacks with their crystal-blue topping, and all night the man's hand went back and forth absently, feeding him. It was the most benign of their rituals, and the most powerful of them all. The man liked Wilhelm for himself, for his warm, comforting presence, but it was also a ritual, a magic, a spell that wound from the man to Wilhelm to the sleeping girl in the cellar below, a thread that unspooled in glowing streamers of gold to the poro's eyes.

It was magic, bright and sorrowful, clear as music and bells and filled with regret enough for weeping. Every treat, every stroke of the hand, even the meaningless chatter the old man directed at Wilhelm was magic, for the poro was a simulacrum for the girl downstairs, and all of it was for her. It was magic, and it was love; love poured from the old man like tears, like blood, love ran like a tide down the stairs to the girl, sleeping in her dark prison underground.

The possibility-lines from the man to the girl strengthened, rayed, became spirals, fractals, thousand-faceted arms that wrapped them both.

And the light increased.

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 _ **Author's Note:** Well, it has been a really really long time, and real life intervened, the way it does. I want to say thank you for the reviews. Those are what pushed me to come back. I read them, then I reread the story, and it struck some sparks. So here I am, sitting down with a new chapter. To answer one question, no, this will not incorporate the new LoL canon, which in my opinion is terrible. It's a shame because I'd managed to wind everything together so neatly with the old canon, pulling together the myths of several different locations, so I'm just going to pretend the new stuff never happened. Anyway, I can't promise how fast I'll get it done or that I'll be able to finish, real life again, but I'll go as long as the inspiration is there and there's story left to be told. Thanks for your kind words!_


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